If I Only Had a Chance, 2019

This series consists of three concrete sculptures that celebrate the work of Oscar Niemeyer. The legendary Brazilian architect had conceived in the 1960s a fair and leisure park-city in Tripoli, a town in North Lebanon, that covers a surface of 600,000 square meters, and that is in danger of being destroyed. For one of the sculptures, representing the Experimental Theatre building, Rechmaoui reproduces the concrete dome in resin, opening to the viewer’s eye a building that is completely closed in reality. By rendering the architecture visible, the artist comments on the opacity of bureaucratic processes in Lebanon, that allow corruption to keep public spaces closed to visitors. Other works from this series include a helipad and a pyramid, three of fifteen pavilions that currently exist in limbo. Carrying the weight of history, they are actually frozen in time.