Developed with photographer and filmmaker Tim Wainwright, and funded by the British Council and Arts Council England through a Developing Your Creative Practice grant, HOME:BEIRUT set out to explore what the concept of home means for diverse people living in and around Beirut, one of the most complex, misunderstood and misrepresented cities in the world.

Building on the sonic portrait methodology developed through Transplant and Life UK, About Soul and Barnfield People, the project was conceived as a deep human inquiry rather than a conventional documentary, holding open a fundamental question rather than seeking to answer it.

Narrative Development | Community Engagement | Sonic Portrait Production | Film and Sound Editing | Arts-Led Research

Initial visits to Beirut established relationships with potential local partners from community, cultural and heritage organisations and universities, laying the groundwork for a deeper immersion to follow.

When Tim was diagnosed with cancer and could not return for the main development phase, the project adapted. We found Palestinian photographer Dalia Khamissy, whose visual sensibility and working practice were startlingly close to Tim's own, and who brought both an instinctive understanding of the project's purpose and extraordinary introductions that would never have been found any other way.

Pete spent eight weeks living in Beirut, working with Dalia and local partner Shaden Ismail, meeting and recording contributions from over fifty people speaking in English, Arabic, French and sign language. Participants came from communities, universities, cultural organisations and everyday life across the city, each one responding to the same central question in their own way, in their own language, in their own voice.

The sonic portraits, Tim's distinctive combination of photography and voice recording, were edited and composed into a body of work that places radically different perspectives alongside each other without mediation or conclusion. The approach is deceptively simple: find the single central question that anyone can respond to and everyone will respond differently to, create the conditions of trust in which people will share something true, and let the diversity of responses speak without imposing a resolution.

Pete and Tim formalised this approach into a manifesto, inspired by the rigour and intentionality of Dogme95, establishing a replicable process that could be adapted to different questions, different communities and different contexts.

Pete subsequently ran a HOME project with MA students at Loughborough University London as part of the MA Collaborate programme, generating a set of companion pieces exploring home through the lenses of language, culture shock and dislocation.

The sonic portrait works because it begins from a position of radical respect: every person has something worth saying, every perspective is a valid contribution, and the job of the artist is not to interpret or explain but to create the conditions in which people can speak truthfully and be heard.

That is a methodology as much as an artistic stance, and it is transferable to any question fundamental enough to produce genuinely different answers from every person asked.

The HOME manifesto demonstrated something we believe across all our work: that a well-designed process, clearly documented and honestly shared, can be taken up by others and produce something new and genuine in a completely different context. The Loughborough students' HOME project was not a reproduction of the Beirut project, it was a new work, shaped by different people, different places and different questions, made possible by the same framework. That transferability is itself a form of impact.

Tim Wainwright passed away in 2018 before he could see the final outcomes of HOME:BEIRUT. His practice, built on the conviction that art creates space for the things people most need to say, lives in everything TGA has made since.

Client: Self-initiated, funded by British Council and Arts Council England, Developing Your Creative Practice

TGA: Narrative Development, Community Engagement, Sonic Portrait Production, Film and Sound Editing

Partners: Tim Wainwright (Photography, Sonic Portrait Methodology), Dalia Khamissy (Photography, Beirut), Shaden Ismail (Local Partnership and Community Engagement, Beirut)