WELCOME TO LEBANON
2020 - ongoing..
This ongoing project on Lebanon commenced at the end of the year 2020. Lebanon’s story is not depicted at a stroke of a pen. However, this photographic exhibition has one purpose: unfolding the most unfavorable national economic crisis that the world has witnessed in more than 150 years.
Fifteen years of civil war have cast their shadows on any hope of a real political salvation. In the textbooks of Lebanese schools, history stops in 1943, the so-called year of independence, because since the beginning of the war in the 1990s, the Lebanese memory has fallen into oblivion, with no redemption. The elderly warlords still in power are guilty of orchestrating yesterday's destruction, while participating in today’s downfall by tearing the country apart, and even wresting Tomorrow from a youth already tormented by the trauma of the past.
In 2019 protests erupted in the streets of the country restoring the dream of the Lebanese youth in a new national system, but faced with the ghost of the past, hopes faded away.
On August 4, 2020, Beirut was devastated by yet another tragedy: the explosion of a stockpile of ammonium nitrate in the port. The customs officers had alerted the authorities several times, but in vain. It was a real turning point, a catastrophe that could and should have been avoided. The Beirut port explosion, which cost the lives of more than 220 people, with 6,500 injured, was the metaphorical culmination, in my opinion, of an era of despoilment of the common good, corruption and impunity.
Today, the World Bank asseverate that Lebanon's economic crisis is the world's worst since 1850, arguing that such a severe collapse is normally the result of a protracted conflict. The Lebanese Lira has lost 80 percent of its value, with most of the workforce – paid in Lira, the local currency – suffering from plummeting purchasing power, in a country where more than 50% of the population now lives below the extreme poverty line. Among this population are the 900,000 Syrian refugees, half being minors, who have fled the scourge of the war in Syria since 2011.
In 2021, Fuel has been rationed, forcing people to queue for up to nine hours at night and during the day to fill half a tank or to buy fuel on the black market at exorbitant prices.
The electricity supply now depends almost exclusively on private generators which operate at full capacity, but are unable to satisfy the growing needs and the owners are in turn forced to ration their production. Energy supply has become a daily struggle to avoid the risk of a blackout. People live with a few hours of electricity a day, some completely without.
Bottom line, Lebanon is losing everyday highly skilled labor searching for opportunities abroad, creating a permanent social and economic collapse, while Western governments block almost all visa applications for those who want to leave, depriving people of their freedom to seek a better decent life elsewhere.
