I Could Have Been Born There

I grew up imagining Beirut long before I ever saw it. "I Could Have Been Born There" uses family archives to trace a life that never happened, failing to prove a factual past, but uncovering the space between memory, fantasy, and identity.

My grandmother called it “The Paris of the Middle East.” Through family stories, photographs, and fragments of memory, I constructed a city I had never visited: the Mediterranean air, the smell of oranges in the streets, the sound of sirens in the distance, the walk uphill to the synagogue. It existed somewhere between inheritance and imagination.

I was born and raised in Argentina in a family of Arab Jews. My father is Lebanese and my mother Brazilian. A few years ago, I discovered that my maternal and paternal grandparents had known each other in Syria and Lebanon before their separate journeys into exile in Latin America. The realization was simple but unsettling: I could have been born there.

This project begins with that possibility.

Through family archives, photographs, maps, and personal documents, I trace the circumstances that brought my family to Argentina and attempt to reconstruct an alternative version of my own history. The materials function as clues in an investigation, asking who I might have been had I been born in Beirut. What streets would I have walked? What language would I have spoken? What forms of belonging would have shaped me?

Yet the project is not an attempt to recover a factual past. The further I follow the evidence, the more uncertain it becomes. Rather than producing answers, the archives reveal gaps, contradictions, and projections. The Beirut I search for is inseparable from the Beirut I have imagined.

Starting from a real family history, the work moves between document and fiction, evidence and speculation. It does not seek to prove where I belong, but to explore how identity can emerge from places we inherit, remember, and invent. In the end, the materials offer no definitive conclusion, only fragments that together construct a personal geography of a city that remains both familiar and unreachable.