‘Posta da Beirut’ consisted of postcards depicting scenes and elements of everyday life in Beirut.
The Lia Rumantscha has launched an artistic residency program in Lebanon, supported by the Swiss Embassy in Beirut. The organization promotes the Romansh language and culture, which is spoken by some 60,000 people in Switzerland.
The illustrator Pia Valär, from Zuoz in the Swiss canton of Grisons, was selected to launch the program. Her artistic project is to create a hundred postcards of Beirut that will be distributed in Switzerland.
Pia Valär is a 32-year-old illustrator who, before embarking on an artistic path, was a teacher, which led her to live in Finland and Sicily. After four years of teaching, she changed course and studied illustration, including three years at the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. Today she lives and works in Zurich as a freelance illustrator.
Her project ‘Posta da Beirut’, which won her the support of the Lia Rumantscha for this artistic residency, consists of postcards depicting scenes and elements of everyday life in Beirut, which she draws with pencil and crayon. About a hundred cards have been pre-ordered following a campaign by Lia Rumantscha to publicize the concept. Her idea is to make sketches of Beirut, hence the use of light materials such as pencils, she seeks to give an account of moments taken on the fly, more an impression than a detailed illustration, because her cards should open the imagination of Beirut of the person who will receive them.
To make a card, Pia either stands in the street and draws in a real situation, which takes her about twenty minutes, or in the studio set up in a room of Zico House, where she is staying. She then uses the photos she takes during her wanderings in the city to make her sketches. And what particularly attracts her attention here are the writings, especially the Arabic alphabet. The illustrator is marked by their omnipresence, whether on signs, storefronts, posters … and often all juxtaposed on top of each other.
Sources:
https://www.piavalaer.ch
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