If you are in Beirut right now, or heading there in the next few weeks, add this one to your list. Because some events are easy to skip, some are unmissable, and this one is firmly the latter — the one you plan around, not the one you fit in.

What am I talking about? Echoes of Existence — on show at the Nuhad Es-Said Pavilion for Culture until October 21, bringing together Gilbert Halabi and Enzo Cucchi, with one unlikely protagonist holding it all together: the pine tree.

Yes, we are talking about that very familiar pine tree. And before you protest, let me warn you: familiar doesn't mean simple. Here, it becomes a way into much bigger conversations about our connection to landscape, nature, memory and history.

So what exactly are we looking at? How does the show unfold? And what might you miss if you don't know where to look? We went through it with the exhibition's amazing curator, Muriel Asmar.

Every exhibition starts with either a concept that leads you to the artists, or the other way around: the artists become the inspiration for the concept. This one worked in the second way, and it could have felt like a tricky task for the curator: Gilbert Halabi and Enzo Cucchi come from different countries, generations and artistic traditions — and their work looks completely different too. Halabi draws you into bright, graphic landscapes built from simplified forms, while Cucchi comes at you very differently — darker, rougher and more expressive, with strange figures and mythological references entering the landscape. But when curator Muriel Asmar looked closer, she found one thing that kept appearing in both: landscape.

But landscape is only one piece of the puzzle. Follow the pine tree a little further and you arrive at something bigger: the Mediterranean itself. What does that have to do with anything? Here is the thread: Lebanon and Italy aren't the obvious pair. Different histories, different languages, different cultures. And yet they sit on the same sea — one that has been stitching their shores together through migration and cultural exchange for centuries.

The pine tree makes that connection visible. It grows across the Mediterranean, including in both Lebanon and Italy, so it belongs naturally to the landscapes of both artists. In the exhibition, it becomes less a symbol of either country and more a point of connection between the two — something rooted in the same Mediterranean landscape, despite everything that separates them.

While two artists — Gilbert Halabi and Enzo Cucchi — sit at the heart of the exhibition, the curator made an interesting choice: rather than simply introducing the artists alone , she also gives us the social and art-historical context behind them: namely, the story of the pine tree as it runs through 20th-century Lebanese art — through the very artists who helped shape what we now call Lebanese modernism.

Why does that matter? Because this fascination with landscape, and with our relationship to it, isn't something that landed in the minds of today's artists by accident. It is inherited — traceable back to an earlier generation of Lebanese painters: Omar Onsi, Moustafa Farroukh, César Gemayel and Aref El Rayess. And in all of their selected works, the pine tree appears too, woven into the Lebanese landscape.

But showing that this story isn't new is part of the point. Look closely at the modernists on show alongside contemporary artists like Gilbert and Enzo, and what changes? You don't need to think too hard — I will save you the trouble.

The modernists were looking at Lebanon through its landscape, and for them, landscape wasn't simply something pretty to paint. In the first half of the 20th century, these artists were helping to shape a visual identity for Lebanon through its mountains, villages, coastline, trees, light and vegetation. Their question was, in a sense: what does Lebanon look like? What makes this landscape unmistakably Lebanese?

With Gilbert and Enzo, the pine tree steps forward. It is no longer simply one element within a wider landscape; it becomes the subject itself — a way into memory and personal experience. And perhaps the best example of what I mean is Gilbert's five-metre Sannine, which he calls My Giant Friend, where scale is used to recreate the tree as he saw it as a child. As he explains, the work is a return to how enormous the tree once seemed to him. This is quite literally how he remembers it.

I know that when an exhibition starts reaching into different themes all at once, it can feel a bit far-fetched. And that is probably what crosses your mind when I mention, right in the intro, that environmental concerns are part of this story too. But here is the thing: it matters. And the curator is quick to remind us why: the pine tree isn't just an artistic image. It is a real, living tree — one that, in both Lebanon and Italy, is currently under threat.

And the numbers make the case for talking about this on their own: 5.5 million hectares burned across the Mediterranean between 2010 and 2023, including more than 1.7 million hectares of forest. The FAO expects fire risk to keep rising as temperatures climb and droughts stretch longer. Fire isn't even the only threat — warmer winters are letting pine-eating insects, like the pine processionary moth, survive and spread into parts of the Mediterranean where the cold once kept them in check.

When talking about the exhibition, there is one thing you can't skip: coming back to the artists themselves. Part of me would love to just let you wander through their works with no extra meanings attached — open-minded, making your own connections. And by this point, you probably already know everything you need to do that. But another part of me wants you to go in even more immersed, with one last piece of the picture: what the artists themselves were going through, and why some of their works came to exist in the first place.

Lucky for us, we got the chance to ask them exactly that. Think of it as a small conversation with the artists — the kind you would have if you bumped into them at the exhibition yourself.

Talking to Enzo Cucchi

Self-taught, and — perhaps surprisingly — a poet before he was ever a painter. Cucchi's early texts were published in La Nuova Foglio di Macerata. By the middle of 1970s, he had moved to Rome, set poetry aside, and thrown himself into visual art instead.

— Could you talk me through these works — how did they come about, and what should we be looking for?

— I can’t guide you; I hope you get lost in my drawings! I don’t believe in inspiration — that is a nice romantic legend. What exists is methodology, work and the courage to allow a shape or a composition to emerge.

I have always worked with the simplest materials and techniques, the oldest and safest: paper, ink, even pieces of wood taken from a wine box. They give me a surface where I can place all my shadows, all the images that pass through me.

— And what about the diptych?

— The diptych comes from my research into the angle. An Italian intellectual once said that it was impossible to put an artwork on a corner, so I started thinking about making works specifically for corners. This diptych is part of that research. Angles are broken points, places where linearity stops and concentration becomes difficult. It is an edge where even the image has to be reimagined and digested in a new way.

Talking to Gilbert Halaby

Born and raised in Lebanon, Halaby has been drawing and painting since childhood. Mount Lebanon shaped his early years — from olive groves and pine trees to the landscapes that continue to appear in his work. After studying archaeology at the Lebanese University in Beirut, his artistic path eventually led him to Rome, where he settled in 2003.

— Could you talk me through your works To a Vast and The Sky to Recite — how did they come about, and what should we be looking for?

— These two artworks are part of a composition of 12 artworks titled The Forest of My Childhood. They depict the pine canopy in front of my childhood home in Dhour El Choueir, Lebanon, where I spent my childhood playing away from people and noise. This forest was my refuge and the incubator of my dreams, especially my dream of becoming a painter.

The works should be read together, particularly with the central canvas, where a tiny being dreams beneath a pine tree and asks:

"— Don’t you fear the wind?

— Alas, my son, I do."

The tree then explains that it has learned where to look when the wind comes: towards the blue sky, knowing that the light will always return.

The human sitting beneath the tree has learned the same lesson. The winds represent the troubles that come from the sides, but as long as he keeps walking, they remain behind him. That human is me. As a child, I planted trees in this forest and came here to escape the noise, find shelter and dream about the colourful life I wanted to create. I eventually left, but I never forgot the forest. I carry it with me wherever I go, and I hope to return one day with my many-coloured stories.

The message is ultimately about protection and persistence: the trees shield us, and we must shield them. We both have to withstand the wind and continue reaching towards the sky.