Arleb by Nabad interviews Yasmine Mehio, architect by education and training, designer, photographer, writer, project planner, event organizer, and visual artist. Mehio strongly believes in the power of storytelling. “We tell stories in an infinite number of ways – they are communal and they are personal and they are intimate and they are loud (…). Beirut seems to be my favorite subject – its streets, its people, its architecture, its culture.”

Arleb by Nabad – What is your background and what is the experience that has influenced your work the most?

Yasmine Mehio – I am an architect by education and practice but I have over the past fifteen years done everything from architecture and design to photography to game design to project planning and screenwriting. As I grow as an artist, I find myself constantly falling back onto two things: Beirut the city I have lived in my whole life, with all its idiosyncrasies, its contradictions, its chaos and its history, and my architectural education; those five years were such an eye opening experience that taught me how to look at the world around me and how to see things and understand them and build a way to tell a story about them. And most recently, the events of October 2019 in Lebanon and then the Beirut Blast, those two events within less than a year of each other really fueled my desire to use art as an expression of what I am seeing and what I am feeling and what I want to share with the world.

Arleb by Nabad – Which subjects or themes are you working on? 

Yasmine Mehio – My work focuses mainly on depicting the city of Beirut, whether its architecture and urban landscape, its iconic buildings and neighborhoods, and also on a smaller scale, the everyday things that make Beirut what it is and makes our lives as Beirutis what it is, and cultural artifacts that are slowly becoming part of a history and a heritage that could be forgotten if we do not strive to remember them and celebrate.

Arleb by Nabad – What is your creative process like? 

Yasmine Mehio – It’s a form of therapy. It’s a way for me to unwind and relax, to come back from a long day at work and close the door on myself and just forget the pressures of the daily grind and dive into the world of pencil and paper and pen and paint and brush for a while. It’s a very personal and intimate process – the music I choose to listen to really affects what I am working on and vice versa. Most days it’s just that: coming back from the day job and taking a few hours to just cleanse my mind and do something that first and foremost makes me happy and allows me to say something, to tell a story to ink and paint and then maybe share it with someone else.

Arleb by Nabad – What was the impact of the Beirut port explosions (August 4, 2020) on your work as an artist/creative enterprise? 

Yasmine Mehio – I don’t think I am even ready to express how the blast affected me emotionally or mentally yet. I know it was months ago but it still feels so absolutely present in every waking – and sometimes sleeping – moment. It’s everywhere. The sound of it still resonates. The ground still shakes. And if that is not enough, everywhere you go around the city, the damage is still evident. As everyone else did, I felt absolutely helpless after the blast but one thing I did that helped me help others was use my art to raise money for people who had been directly affected, needed medical aid or financial aid to rebuild their homes. But if the blast did anything, it made me more determined than ever to celebrate this glorious city, to tell its story to the world, to immortalize it in any way I knew how. And my art was one of those ways.

Arleb by Nabad – What are, according to you, the roles of arts and culture in social, economic, environmental or political change? 

Yasmine Mehio – Art and culture can be the purest and most powerful tools of expression, a voice to those who otherwise might be silenced or feel marginalized or ignored. They are also a powerful tool to expose truths, corruption and realities. They are a vessel to carry thoughts and ideas and ideals and concepts of change and empowerment. Whether for the content creator or the recipient of the art, it can be a tool for change, a weapon for both to instigate change, empower communities, breathe life into a force that is seeking to break from clutches of tyranny or corruption and give motivation and inspiration and hope.

Arleb by Nabad – What are, according to you, the main challenges/obstacles facing artists/creative enterprises in Lebanon nowadays? 

Yasmine Mehio – It’s not easy living in Lebanon these days, not just as an artist, but just in general. There is no denying that. Everyone is fighting a daily battle to survive. So to say artists have it harder than others is not fair, in my opinion. We’re all going through this together – the economic crisis, the pandemic, the political crisis, the aftermath of the blast -, all of this has put us all as a society under immeasurable stress and put us in an unimaginably difficult reality. And it is that reality, the struggle to maintain the bare minimum of a decent life that provides artists with probably a different kind of obstacle. The discussion becomes that of “who has time for that when we’re barely making ends meet – or when there is so much more to deal with”. When the economy is the way it is, you think it might be wiser to put the “instability” of an art driven life aside to try and make things happen elsewhere in search of something more stable, more reliable or more… realistic, as it were.

CHECK OUT YASMINE MEHIO PROFILE AND ARTWORKS FOR SALE ON ARLEB.