There is a violinist, a farmer tilling his field and a cockerel with a propeller for a head. All were once rockets, artillery shells or bullets falling on Lebanon’s battlefields.
Artist Charles Nassar has been transforming their dark, wrangled remains into sculptures to celebrate tradition and memory.
“I hate shrapnel, but I also love it at the same time,” the 54-year-old with a neat salt-and-pepper beard said in a garden south of Beirut.
Photo: AFP
Nassar was forced to flee Lebanon during the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War and his grandmother was killed in the violence. However, she and other characters of the artist’s past live on, displayed in the nooks and crannies of his garden in the village of Remhala.
“The shrapnel takes on shapes in my mind... They guide me to what I should do with them,” the artist said.
Nassar first created his metal sculptures in Beirut, but after the war he decided to display them on land he owns in Remhala.
He has worked the war detritus into 250 creations so far, selling 150 that he is now working to replace.
“I don’t want to remind people of war,” Nassar said.
Instead, the idea is that “anybody who was bothered by an artillery shell starts to like it,” he said. “I’m trying to turn black into white, something negative into something positive.”
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