photographist

“I work on war ruins in Beirut as part of my PhD in architecture. It is a subject I find utterly captivating. I work on a collection of photographs – in particular Gabriele Basilico and Mimmo Joddice – as a window into the study of Italian heritage policies, which are very much focused on identity whereas Beirut is more focused on amnesia and disappearance. I examine the idea of suspended reality, of memory in ruins, the desire to regain what has been lost, the process of ruin as deconstructed architectural landscape – something that is not quite a zero state, but almost. Beirut desperately tries to make ruins disappear and make people forget the war; based on this obliteration of ruins, I am going to focus on reconstruction projects in Beirut, by working with architects and artists from the Solidere project – the city's main reconstruction project.

The conservation of ruins and the desire to leave them as they are in the landscape, as witnesses of war, is an interesting issue, linked to conservation and the protection of heritage.
In Beirut it is very complicated because everything has been rebuilt, everything is new. Why have politicians sought total amnesia by making a tabula rasa of the past. I need to go there to carry out a field study. On the other hand, Berlin has preserved the visible traces of its ruins, in particular the churches which were demolished in the Second World War. I am interested in the work of the so-called "women of the ruins" (die Trümmerfrauen, literally the women of the rubble). These women set upon clearing up and rebuilding the city, while also remaining committed to maintaining the memory of the war. Women seem more concerned about history, and their stories – the transmission of memory – than men.”

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