Orianne Ciantar Olive - The Circular Ruins

Orianne Ciantar Olive
The Circular Ruins

Published by Dunes Editions, 2024
Book size 24 x 16 cm
138 pages
Hardcover
First edition of 1000 copies

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Circular Ruins takes us to a contemporary South Lebanon, nicknamed Nabil (the other side of Lebanon), where neither the sun nor death can look each other in the eye.
Led by photographer Orianne Ciantar Olive, the project addresses the issues of violence, occupation, and forced exile that have cyclically crossed the territory for decades, and how these events have an impact on both individuals and the collective. Simultaneously visual research and experimentation with the photographic medium, this body of work, through a sensitive approach to the disaster at work, constitutes a testimony to the universal complexity of certain territories to come. Inspired by writings from philosophy, literature, and poetry—in particular the work of Etel Adnan, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mahmoud Darwich—Les Ruines Circulaires is a photographic essay halfway between a metaphysical journey and a documentary narrative, anchored in the territory of South Lebanon, all the way to the Kfar Kila wall. An emblematic and empirical example of the perpetual recommencement of events, notably violence, forced exiles and an impossible access to peace, it becomes here, through a play of inversions, the theater announcing a current event that is revealed in the shadows of reality. Reversal of names, fictitious identities, reversed films, solarizations, are tested to reveal another part of history. By establishing a visual relationship to the question of disaster, by constructing a dialogue between external tensions and internal conflicts, the universal complexity of the future appears, implicitly, within a territory constantly prey to partisan or colonialist tendencies.

Photos © Maximiliano Tineo