My work "Beirut, Recurring Dream" is my attempt to inhabit a city that exists both in reality and imagination - a place lived, remembered, and continuously re-staged in the mind. Beirut is not a stable geography but a shifting scenario: fractured by war, absence, and exile, yet charged with the enduring ability to seduce, unsettle, and dream itself anew. As a child, I left Beirut abruptly in 1983, carrying only fragments: checkpoints on the way to school, the scent of the sea along the corniche, the fragrance of orange blossom from hidden gardens. Decades later, when I returned, the city revealed itself as both familiar and strange, layered with histories I had missed yet carried unconsciously. My photographs navigate this paradox: the impossibility of reconciling past and present, memory and reality, loss and desire. In this project, Beirut is not rendered as documentary truth but as a stage where imagination fills the gaps of history. Images of abandoned interiors, luminous seascapes, and fleeting encounters are interwoven with archival material, collapsing reality and fiction into one another. The city emerges as a dreamscape as much as a lived environment - both present and elusive. My images are not illustrations of fact but invitations to imagine: to sense the weight of history in an empty room, to hear echoes in a photograph of silence, to feel intimacy across absence. They stage memory and desire, born of distance as much as of return. "Beirut, Recurring Dream" resists flattening into stereotype. In a time when narratives of war and crisis often reduce the city to a single image, the work insists on complexity. It is not a simple testimony, but a shifting stage where scenarios unfold: dreams of return, fears of loss, fragile moments of beauty. It asks how belonging can be constructed when home is both present and lost, and how photography can give form to the unseen - not to escape reality, but to reimagine it.

My work "Beirut, Recurring Dream" is my attempt to inhabit a city that exists both in reality and imagination - a place lived, remembered, and continuously re-staged in the mind. Beirut is not a stable geography but a shifting scenario: fractured by war, absence, and exile, yet charged with the enduring ability to seduce, unsettle, and dream itself anew. As a child, I left Beirut abruptly in 1983, carrying only fragments: checkpoints on the way to school, the scent of the sea along the corniche, the fragrance of orange blossom from hidden gardens. Decades later, when I returned, the city revealed itself as both familiar and strange, layered with histories I had missed yet carried unconsciously. My photographs navigate this paradox: the impossibility of reconciling past and present, memory and reality, loss and desire. In this project, Beirut is not rendered as documentary truth but as a stage where imagination fills the gaps of history. Images of abandoned interiors, luminous seascapes, and fleeting encounters are interwoven with archival material, collapsing reality and fiction into one another. The city emerges as a dreamscape as much as a lived environment - both present and elusive. My images are not illustrations of fact but invitations to imagine: to sense the weight of history in an empty room, to hear echoes in a photograph of silence, to feel intimacy across absence. They stage memory and desire, born of distance as much as of return. "Beirut, Recurring Dream" resists flattening into stereotype. In a time when narratives of war and crisis often reduce the city to a single image, the work insists on complexity. It is not a simple testimony, but a shifting stage where scenarios unfold: dreams of return, fears of loss, fragile moments of beauty. It asks how belonging can be constructed when home is both present and lost, and how photography can give form to the unseen - not to escape reality, but to reimagine it.