Beirut, Recurring Dream

Beirut, Recurring Dream stages the city as memory and imagination. Through images and archives, it becomes a shifting landscape of loss, desire, and fragile beauty.

Project Statement
Beirut, Recurring Dream
Tanya Traboulsi

My project Beirut, Recurring Dream is an attempt to inhabit a city that exists both in reality and in imagination; a place lived, remembered, and continuously re-staged in the mind. Beirut is not a stable geography but a shifting scenario: a city 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 in 1983, in the midst of the civil war, carrying fragments of memory. I remembered the checkpoints on the way to school, the scent of the sea at the corniche, and the smell of orange blossom from the Beiruti gardens.
Decades later, when I returned as an adult, the city revealed itself as both familiar and strange, layered with histories I had missed yet carried inside me unconsciously. My photographs seek to navigate this paradox: the impossibility of reconciling past and present, memory and reality, loss and desire.

In Beirut, Recurring Dream, the city appears not as documentary truth but as a stage where imagination fills the gaps of history. Through images that hover between the intimate and the collective, I construct scenarios that oscillate between utopian longing and the darkness of memory. Photographs of abandoned interiors, luminous seascapes, and fleeting encounters are woven with archival material, creating a space where reality and fiction collapse into one another. Beirut emerges as a city that refuses resolution: it is as much a dreamscape as a lived environment.
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 are stagings of memory and desire, born of both distance and return.

In an era where narratives of war and crisis often flatten Beirut into stereotype, Beirut, Recurring Dream insists on complexity. It is not a simple testimony, but a shifting stage where scenarios unfold: dreams of return, fears of loss, moments of fragile beauty. In this way, the work asks how we construct belonging when home is both present and lost, and how photography can give form to the unseen - not to escape reality, but to reimagine it.