Christian Catafago

Alexis and I have collected old negatives found on Lebanon’s flee markets and alleys over the past years: through these, we would try to descipher daily downtown Beirut to understand how might have been life in this part of town that we never new as it was unaccessible during the war and destroyed in the aftermath. We didn’t want to take at face value all the dreamland stories we heard about life in Beirut before. It is through browsing images of the time and place that we started to imagine the good and bad of the era.

We could not help but feel the burnout of Lebanon’s society in 2020. In the car-racing sense, the country had been, over a long period, inducing in ever- going burnouts: strips of rubber and dense smoke were imageries of a strong society trying to show off and be all it can be for such a long time.

Burn-out also refers to the prevalent exhaustion of the population here; resilience has been a term systematically used by journalists since I was a child. Now in 2020, we feel Alexis and I that there isn’t any room left for endurance, all are wasted to the core, burnt inside out.

We wouldn’t take pictures of the anguish of society: miserabilism has never been in the Lebanese bloodline. Instead we decided Alexis and I to intervene directly on old negatives of Lebanese residents taken by professional studios in the vicinity of Beirut’s downtown area.

We burned negatives.

Using a mix of heating tools including ovens, we ended up with anonymous individual, yet completely recognizable as being Lebanese: portraits of anguish. As we witnessed the gates of hell opening up in the Port of Beirut on the fourth of August, a prayer resonates to my heart:

Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal on that fearful day,
When the heavens and the earth shall be moved,
When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.