Beirut Rivages is a work of texts and photographs born from a collaboration with the International House of Writers in Beirut, bringing together Camille Ammoun, Charif Majdalani, Hyam Yared, Maylis de Kerangal, Nasri Sayegh, Oliver Rohe, and Stéphanie Hage. Together, they walked the shores of Beirut to tell their story, weaving literary and photographic perspectives into a sensitive and political exploration of the Beirut coastline.
The starting point is simple yet powerful: to look at the city from its shores. But very quickly, the landscape becomes a language. The beaches, the corniche, the rocky promontories, the concrete wastelands, the forbidden or privatized zones tell far more than a backdrop: they bear the visible traces of Lebanese history, from war to reconstruction, from real estate speculation to civic resistance, from intimate memory to collective fracture. Through the meticulous description of the geography and uses of these places, it is Beirut in its entirety that reveals itself—in its ambitions, its impulses, and its fault lines.
Each text offers a singular crossing of the shoreline: personal memories, poetic meditations, walking narratives, sensitive analyses of urban space. The coastline emerges as an unstable frontier between city and sea, but also between past and present, between what belongs to everyone and what has been seized, between hope and violence. The photographs extend and enrich these narratives, making visible a landscape that is at once magnificent and wounded, where concrete, sea, and bodies coexist.
