Lebanon is currently grappling with a deep economic crisis after successive governments piled up immense debt. Overnight, the Ponzi scheme installed by the Bank’s central governor since the end of the civil war has crumpled. Banks, main beneficiaries of this lucrative “Financial Engineering”, have blocked savers accounts. The currency has crashed, driving 80% of the population into poverty. Weekly grocery bills can equal months of a typical family’s income.

During Covid-19 lockdown, Lara Tabet and I, working under the alias Jeanne et Moreau, photographed Beirut with binoculars, from the window of our apartment overlooking the port. The day after the explosion of August 4, 2020, amongst the ruins of our apartment, I found the binoculars and took some photos of the neighborhood on the fly, with no other intention than to keep a trace of the damage caused by the explosion. These photographic juxtapositions were inspired by stereoscopic views where spatial distance is replaced by a temporal break, before and after the port’s explosion.

As a result of the curfews imposed between March 2020 and May 2021 by the Lebanese government to contain the Covid-19 epidemic, Beirut was looking like an utopian advertisements campaign, empty and soulless, as if 3D rendered. The integration of these pictures I took in Beirut’s deserted streets to the pictures of my previous Beirutopia series accentuates the feeling of losing bearings in time and space and the confusion of borders between utopia and reality.

Following the lebanese civil wars, Beirut was the theater of a (re)construction frenzy. To advertise construction projects, developers display large billboards in situ reproducing the future of these structures. They simulate the edifices, their surroundings, imaginary residents and their lifestyle as a marketing strategy to sell their product. These photographs capture the virtual images of these billboards framed within their real environment making use of scale, layering and image framing to underline a critical reading of Beirut's urban future.

“parallel universes” explores the interactions between separate and simultaneously occurring realities. The viewer is asked to contend with new dimensions of understanding, where horror and leisure co-exist in the same frame. This hyper-realistic framework reveals the duality of war and relative peace which prevails in Lebanon, while also asking the spectator to redefine the limits of his/her relationship to images and reality.

“abandoned rooms” is a series about fragmented lives, lives that are stuck between the reality of the changeover and the haunting ghost of the war. They speak of the past in the present, of presence in absence, of death and survival, of what is forgotten and what lingers, what rots and is transformed.

“la grotte aux pigeons” depicts young men and boys jumping off Beirut’s coastal cliffs facing the notorious arch-like "Pigeon’s Rock". The photographs emphasis an exaggerated display of machismo that defines male-to-male relations in patriarchal societies. The photographs embody a lurking paradox - the timelessness of Beirut in spite of modernity and the postwar policy of reconstruction.

Nearly a decade after the end of the Lebanese Civil War, I regularly visited the ruins of a building at the corner of a busy crossroads. I would sneak into the place, choose an overhanging vantage point and set up my camera. Perched this way above the city, I could see without being seen. In this video made from black-and-white slides, the photographer’s viewpoint blends with that of a sniper, shooting at passers-by of a residential neighborhood, in a macabre role-playing reversal.