Fragments, Part of Unpredictable Times, Five Screen Video and Sound Installation, Lebanon, France, 2024.

Fragments was selected by the patronage commission of la Fondation des Artistes, which gave it its support.

Fragments is a poetic and immersive 5-channel video and sound installation, presented across five screens arranged in space. The piece functions in a continuous loop, accompanied by two alternating soundtracks, offering viewers different sensorial and emotional experiences depending on when and how they enter the space. The installation is part of the broader project Unpredictable Times, which also includes the film Behind the Shield.

Filmed using a Dash Cam mounted on the windshield of Sirine Fattouh’s car in Lebanon between 2018 and 2021, Fragments transforms this tool of surveillance into a silent witness of a country in flux. The work captures fragments of daily life in Lebanon, where mundane moments take on a poetic charge and rupture with reality. Gradually, the oversaturated energy of the city gives way to emptier roads and quieter landscapes, opening space for new imaginaries to emerge.

This contemplative gaze reflects the artist’s deeply personal relationship with Beirut—a city in perpetual transformation through war, revolution, and crisis, reshaping both its topography and the psychological bearings of its inhabitants. The Dash Cam becomes an extension of the artist’s eye, recording a shifting territory where personal and collective memory intertwine.

The journey begins in Beirut just weeks before the 2018 elections. Posters blanket the streets, and the atmosphere is carefree and vibrant. The dynamic editing mirrors this energy—a fragile vitality soon disrupted. Subtle cues in the footage foreshadow the upheavals to come: the October 2019 revolution, the financial collapse, and the port explosion of 2020.

The final sequence opens with a rainstorm and leads into a deserted city, silenced by the Covid-19 lockdowns. The fervor of protest gives way to desolation. The installation closes in the winter of 2020 with a snow-covered landscape—serene, distant, almost unreal. This final image evokes a childhood memory, a fleeting sense of joy, suspended outside time.

In collaboration with sound artist Jean-Jacques Palix, and Nour Sokhon.