Les ruines circulaires

Les ruines circulaires – Les Ruines Circulaires takes us to a contemporary South Lebanon, nicknamed Nabil (the reverse of Lebanon), where neither the sun nor death can look each other in the eye.

Led by photographer Orianne Ciantar Olive, the project addresses the issues of violence, occupation and forced exile that have plagued the territory cyclically for decades, and how these events impact on individuals and communities alike.

Both visual research and experimentation with the photographic medium, this body of work, through a sensitive approach to the disaster at work, bears witness to the universal complexity of certain territories in the making.

Nourished by writings from philosophy, literature and poetry – in particular the work of Etel Adnan, Jorge Luis Borges and Mahmoud Darwich – Les Ruines Circulaires is a photographic essay halfway between metaphysical journey and documentary account, anchored in the territory of southern Lebanon, right up to the wall of Kfar Kila. An emblematic and empirical example of the perpetual recommencement of events, particularly violence, forced exile and the impossibility of achieving peace, the wall becomes here, through a game of inversions, the heralding theater of a reality that reveals itself in the shadows of reality. Reversed names, fictitious identities, reversed films and solarizations are all used to reveal another side of history. By establishing a visual relationship with the question of disaster, by building a dialogue between external tensions and internal conflicts, the universal complexity of the future emerges from a territory constantly prey to partisan or colonialist tendencies.

signed copies