the heights, the trees and the concrete

Rooted in Lebanon & Sweden, I search for home in fleeting light—the scent of jasmine or petrol, the sea’s pull, silence between worlds and the shifting shades of rocks. My work traces the longing that lingers in moments where belonging almost begins.

Between the two contrasting places —Lebanon and Sweden—my sense of home has always been fractured and chaotic, suspended somewhere in transit, and characterised by an endless and intangible yearning. My parents fled the Lebanese civil war in the early 1980s, eventually settling in a small town in Sweden, where I was born against all odds and named Aya, meaning "miracle" in Arabic. I grew up with two much older brothers and a majority of native Swedish friends, which left me feeling alien and restless —unable to make sense of the explosive emotions inside me, and always finding grounding in the momentary and intangible spaces between silence and noise, snow and heat, longing and belonging, light and dark, pain and cathartic release.

This eternal vortex of longing and search for home continues to drive me creatively, shaping how I see and capture the world.

This project is an attempt to trace the invisible contours of that longing—to photograph the spaces where memory and displacement intersect. Through the textures of the mundane, I look for fleeting gestures of familiarity: the smell of jasmine or petrol, the invisible yet magnetic connections, the force of the sea, the glint of light on wet rock and how it shifts throughout the day. These moments—ordinary yet charged—hold an emotional resonance that transcends geography and calms the burning heat within me.

I am drawn to impulsive adventures, constantly exploring and the in-between: where cultures, people, seasons, and feelings overlap; where the heights, the trees, and the concrete sing, echoing the melody of home, space and safety.

All photography is fully analogue, some shot with my parents' old camera from when they were young and others through one that belonged to a dear friend's grandfather. While this project is not bound by location, it was initiated to connect with my hometown Tripoli, Lebanon, on my own terms, after always experiencing it through my family's lens.

It was during some heavily tumultuous years and a series of events starting just before COVID until recently. I was stuck in a spiral of deep depression, and also dealing with a lot of loss without any proximity to its source, including that of three crucial people, my uncle, my grandpa and someone important whom I felt shared my same breath. They all embodied this particular concept of home, freedom and grounding for me, and their voices have echoed through my work since then. I once exhibited the photography from Lebanon in a local space, where I hung the first six prints on the wall, and the rest were placed in a physical photo album resembling the piles of photo albums we have within my family, inviting the audience into an intimate experience of my world.

I've had a tense, yet sentimental and treasured relationship with Lebanon and the concept of home for as long as I can remember, especially now, considering the traumas I've been working through in recent years and with the horrifying current state of the world, and its neglect of marginalised people. My art helps me untie the knot and make sense of the sensation that constantly ignites my nervous system. It's my grounding rock.

The work unfolds as a romantic and visual meditation on migration, nostalgia, and the idea of home as an ever-shifting landscape.

In photographing the unpredictable and the familiar—the glistening of light, the fragments of intimacy, and the intangible pulse —I hope to capture my language of belonging as fluid, intuitive, and at the intersection, living and breathing as an abstract concept, not bound to a single location. The images do not aim to define home but to inhabit the spaces where it flickers briefly into being, sparking a sense of hope.

The project is still ongoing, and the images can continue to be reworked. I have many more from this series, especially of buildings and life in my neighbourhood in Tripoli. Considering the limitation of images, I wanted to show my favourites from Lebanon, and the range of photography, with a few examples of imagery that have reflected this essence elsewhere.

This project was submitted to PhMuseum 2025 Women Photographers Grant