LE BONHEUR TUE

“The Happiness That Kills” is an artistic project born from the need to transform press photographs illustrating various periods in Lebanon’s history. The double explosion at the port of Beirut in 2020 rekindled the pain and anguish of an entire people, reawakening the traumas of a country regularly scarred. The artist, who grew up trying to escape these “ghost images,” now seeks to reclaim them by coloring and manipulating these pictures, in an effort to better understand and exorcise the sufferings of the past. Through an approach blending folk imagery and war photography, the work questions the eternal return of trauma, revealing recurring motifs such as flight, screams, or distress. Far from seeking the spectacular, the artist favors a subjective selection of photographs which, through their dialogue and universal dimension, become archetypes of human tragedy. Through coloring and photomontage, several temporal and symbolic layers intertwine, confronting individual and collective memory. This project highlights the difficulty of taming psychological pain and sheds light on the duality of the Lebanese people, oscillating between pride and self-hatred, in a country where beauty and chaos coexist.

This book was shortlisted for the Author’s Book Award at the Rencontres d’Arles 2025