Dunes Editions, 2024. Edition of 1,000 copies. Spiral bound, 138 pp., 52 color and 22 b/w illustrations, 160 x 240 mm. Photographs by Orianne Ciantar Olive. Text by Sabyl Ghoussoub (English / French). Design by Bureau Kayser.
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 or forced exile that have been crossing the territory in a cyclical manner for decades and how these events have an impact both individually and collectively.
Both visual research and experimentation with the photographic medium, this body of work constitutes, through a sensitive approach to the disaster at work, a testimony to the universal complexity of certain territories to come.
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 a metaphysical journey and a documentary narrative that is anchored in the territory of South Lebanon, up to the wall of Kfar Kila. An emblematic and empirical example of the perpetual recommencement of events, in particular violence, forced exiles and an impossible access to peace, it becomes here, through a play of inversions, the theater announcing a current event that is revealed in the shadows of reality. Reversal of names, fictitious identities, reversed films, solarizations, are tested to reveal another part of history. By establishing a visual relationship to the question of disaster, by constructing a dialogue between external tensions and internal conflicts, the universal complexity of the future appears in the background within a territory constantly prey to partisan or colonialist inclinations.
