Fabiao's cinematic intervention marks the second event in the annual Beirut Street Festival. Every September, the loose-knit local cultural foundation that is Zico House stages a series of public performances and happenings for the purpose of bringing the arts to the streets. This year, Zico (aka Moustapha Yamouth) and his co-conspirator Rola Kobeissi decided not to stack the deck with a concentrated month-long program but rather to stretch the festival out over a year. The results are more autonomous events with a higher profile and international reach. Fabiao's project teams Zico House with a similar not-for-profit arts organization in New York called White Box, and takes sponsorship from both Virgin and Solidere (the private real estate company that owns the plot on which the bubble stands).

Though the bubble was slated for demolition a year ago, Solidere has since commissioned architect Bernard Khoury to rehabilitate the building as a mixed-use cultural and commercial center. Work has already started, and while the designs are still subject to a few last minute tweaks, Khoury hopes to be finished by May 2005. In the meantime, a project like "Transitio" does much to animate the site and highlight its potential. By day, the bubble has a monumental aspect. The shape of the building set against the vast empty space that surrounds it commands awe and attention. But by night the bubble retreats like a ghost. It stands on a dead zone, after all, with no lights to illuminate it and no activities to bring it back to life.

Fabiao has changed all that, albeit fleetingly. From a distance, it is a stunning sight to see scenes from her films flickering across the ravaged skin of the bubble. And unlike so much of the restoration work that characterizes downtown Beirut, Fabiao's project is neither pat nor pretty. Rather, with its jerky movements and handheld angles, it is hectic, a little rough, and thoroughly contemporary.

"It was my dream to white-wash the entire building," says Fabiao, sitting in the parking lot in front of the bubble last Thursday night, herself decked in white, beer in hand, and perched on a white plastic chair filched from the nearby valets.

"Solange, you have to pay to park here," jokes the perpetually fanny-packed Zico, as an oversized Mercedes tries to muscle into the vacant parking spaces where a clutch of viewers - on chairs and without cars - have set up camp to watch the projections.

Among those in attendance are Fabiao, Zico, Kobeissi, the architect Stephen Holl and the artist Nadim Karam. It's a fitting assortment of onlookers, in that they are all, in one way or another, committed to the idea of public art as a vital component of city living. Holl is building Beirut's new marina, and his design scheme includes five platforms for public sculptures and site-specific installations. Karam is the force behind the "Archaic Procession," a series of enormous sculptures that he moved periodically around the city back when downtown really was little more than a wasteland.

Fabiao, who was born in Rio de Janeiro, started the "Transitio" project in 2000, when she took a long (and no doubt wallet gauging) cab ride from 228th Street, on the edge of Manhattan and the Bronx, all the way down Broadway to Wall Street. She filmed the entire ride, and the unedited film that resulted was "Duration: 1 Hour, 3 Minutes, 17.3 Miles," one of the films projected onto the bubble last week.

Fabiao describes "Transitio" as "a global dialogue, a city within a city." To date, she has shot footage in nearly 10 cities, including Beirut, Istanbul, Mexico City, London, and Paris. The idea is to bring images of one city into another.

"I like the combination of the two dynamics," she explains. "It's about the relationship between cities. So maybe you bring Beirut into Sao Paulo or Shanghai into Chinatown in New York."

Pairing Beirut with New York on one end and Shanghai on the other was not entirely incidental. "The idea of east and west is so central in Beirut," suggests Fabiao.

Fabiao has presented "Transitio" in New York, Mexico City, and a tiny town in northern Finland called Tornio. All three shows took place indoors as video installations. Her Beirut showing, therefore, marks the first time Fabiao has been able to mount her project outdoors in a public space.

Trained as an architect and a set designer, Fabiao first entered the realm of contemporary art as a painter, before discovering video art. Now, she is a sworn convert who is rarely without her camera.

"The whole system of filming is based on randomness," she says. "How we select images is not based on a storyboard. It's both conscious and unconscious. The conceptual part of this work is to contemplate something from afar. It's not about presence and absence but about presence and distance and virtuality. It's also about the amount of information we absorb, which eventually leads to some story or an infinite number of possible stories."

Having moved from Brazil to Berlin in 1989, Fabiao has had prior experience with a city in the throes of reconstruction. "I moved there right before the fall of the Berlin wall. I stayed for five years. I saw the reunification of the city," she says. "But ultimately, I didn't feel German enough to help rebuild the city." After a bit of soul searching over whether or not she should return to Brazil, she settled for New York, where she has lived and worked since 1994.

Of course, she still travels constantly, and whenever she lands in a new city, she tends to pull out her camera to film before doing anything else.

"It's always my first experience with a city," she says of her work. "It's my first exchange - my desire to go through and discover the city in that way."