Almost exactly one year after the disaster at the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020, Chrystèle Khodr recorded the text for this audio piece in Beirut, for which she revisited the legend of the "Switzerland of the Orient". This is what Lebanon was known as in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Chrystèle Khodr, the strange thing is that many people in Lebanon still wax lyrical about this "Switzerland of the Orient", which - despite banking secrecy - never really existed.

Part of the credit for this may go to the well-known historical figure of Youssef Beidas, a Palestinian-Lebanese businessman and banker whose lifelong ambition was to develop Beirut as the Middle East's commercial and financial centre. In 1951, he founded Intra Bank - once the largest bank in Lebanon, whose controversial bankruptcy in 1966 casts a long shadow into the present, and continues to shape collective memory (and forgetting) in Lebanon.

This live listening piece traces the story of Youssef Beidas from Beirut in the 1960s to his arrest in Switzerland and finally to his grave in Lucerne. Sometimes tenderly, sometimes mockingly, sometimes almost mechanically, Khodr recounts episodes from past and present crises. She tells of her everyday life in a country where people wait in vain for hours in front of the bank to withdraw some money for rent and food, of conversations with friends in the real Switzerland, which seems farther away than ever, or of the hours before the explosion on a seemingly ordinary day in the midst of an ongoing collapse. In the end, her story returns to the crumbling remains of the grain silos in the port of Beirut - once designed by Youssef Beidas - half of which withstood the blast wave and protected part of the city from greater destruction.

The performance was commissioned as a live listening piece by the Zürcher Theater Spektakel with the support of AFAC, Mophradat and Al Mawred Cultural Resources in 2021. It premieres in Arabic with live English translation at the Beirut Spring Festival 2022.