A graduate of Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program, he is part of the Public Programs team at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and a 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale Fellow (Canada Council for the Arts). His work has been presented at Galerie Tanit (Beirut) and the Institut du monde arabe (Paris), with a forthcoming presentation at Manif d’art, Québec Biennale (Québec City). It is held in the collections of the Institut du monde arabe (Donation Claude & France Lemand), the Dalloul Art Foundation, and the Beirut Museum of Art.
Galerie Tanit, Beirut
In July 2021, a wildfire reached Andaket, my native village on Lebanon’s northern border. Like many, I have known my town from afar, tied to the land through my grandparents and a handful of childhood memories. In September of that same year, my grandfather passed away, severing the ties I had left to this place.
Amid this double loss, and through a period of grief, I was consumed by the guilt of no longer being able to care for the land. Both anchors had dissolved, and I found in myself a sense of freedom away from my roots.
Is that freedom worth its price?
Today, Lebanese youth are facing an unprecedented wave of emigration as a way to cope with the country’s ongoing socio-economic collapse. In searching for stability away from home, and in letting go of their anchors, a sense of detachment takes hold.
Eulogy to My Roots questions these layers of loss and the legitimacy of this path toward freedom. In the form of artifacts carved in cedar wood and covered in white paint, it commemorates a journey shaped by detachment and return.
As the work moves between uprooting and return, freedom is measured against what it costs to leave. If physical anchors disappear, can one ever let go, or do roots return as memory?