Totem of the present & the absent
October 2025
Participating in We Design Beirut is more than an artistic commitment for me, it’s a symbolic, intimate return to a city that continues to inhabit my memory. The theme of this edition, between attachment and departure, memory and place, deeply resonates with my practice. My work explores the invisible threads we weave with the places we leave, without ever fully leaving them behind. Creating a totem for Beirut is a way to extend the questions raised in my recent exhibition We left home… but what is home:
What does it mean to belong?
What do we carry with us when we leave?
What do we reinvent when we return?
It is, above all, a tribute to a city shaped by rupture, return, and renewal.
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Page Blanche – Totem
Page Blanche totem consists of a central textile work and satellite artworks as bronze sculpyures ans multi-media works. My work explores the invisible threads we weave with the places we leave, without ever fully leaving them behind.
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Web Shelter, Page blanche
Everything remains to be rewritten.
White threads unfurl like a blank page, one time has yet to write, or history has erased. This work calls for reinvention, without denying the past.
Purple threads weave through the white, echoes of ancient wealth and Phoenician murex dyes.
A red thread runs through, evoking war, spilled blood, and the silent pain of a wounded nation.
Blue recalls the Mediterranean: nurturing, open, and fluid with memories of departures and returns. Gold glints in the light, a tribute to the blazing sun and the enduring idea of Lebanon as a beacon in the Middle East.
This is a work in balance, between forgetting and remembering, silence and transmission. Fragile yet grounded, it holds both the trace of what was and the promise of what will be.
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Portrait of a bird, π
Silent and still, this bronze bird carries the breath of a migrating people. Wings folded, gaze fixed on the horizon, it embodies the tension between rest and departure. A symbol of exile and return, weight and lightness, rupture and connection, it stands as a fragile anchor, holding both the memory of what was and the promise of flight to come.
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The book, Page Blanche
Living archive of inspirations, a handmade notebook at the crossroads of a personal journal and a laboratory of ideas.
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The Nest
A house, or the feeling of a home, a golden composite structure, where two elements, like yin and yang, complement and complete one another.
Much like instruments tuning together to create a single composition, the many places that dwell within us, along with the sensations they carry, intertwine to form a textured patchwork in which each of us may recognize our own idea of home.
It is a composite structure shaped by all our internal homes, revealing a singular, deeply personal vision of what it means to belong.
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Poème
(translation)
Amnesia of a lived life
Nostalgia for a utopian future
A land kneaded by sunlight
Dotted with blood
Washed by the salt of the azure
Haloed by a crimson past
Tread by the uncertain steps
Of a sleepwalking tightrope walker
Between the shores of the unknown
With as its only crown
A wounded pride
Bruises upon the soul
Blank Page…