21 - Orianne Ciantar Olive - Les Ruines circulaires

Jul 6, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026

Between documentary narrative and speculation, Circular Ruins looks at a territory at war in order to shift its coordinates. In 2019, Orianne Ciantar Olive set out to return to Syria, following the former Beirut–Damascus railway line, which was destroyed during the civil war. She never crossed the border. Confined to a space of impassable lines, she headed south, deciding to trace the path of disaster back to what she identified as its point of origin: the separation wall at Kfar Kila. Lebanon (Liban) becomes “Nabil,” an anagram and a reversal. The cardinal points are inverted; the path of the sun is hypothetically displaced. The principle of inversion is not metaphorical: it operates at the level of the image itself. The film is reversed in the camera; images are produced on the reverse side of the film, without emulsion, in direct contact with the film base. Light no longer registers on a sensitive surface but passes through the raw material, altering colors, densities and points of reference. Solarization, false identities, and the inversion of names and maps extend this deliberate disorientation. The overall structure adopts a spiral form. Sequences mirror one another around a central body—the sun—both a visual motif and a conceptual operator. The alternation of surfaces gives physical form to the idea of beginning again. This poetic, political and metaphysical essay analyzes the repetition of violence and the production of archives in real time. Moving between experimentation in photography, performance, writing and situated inquiry, Circular Ruins does not document a conflict: it tests the capacity of the image to shift our perspective and exposes an underlying question: what can an image do in the face of disaster when it turns against its own certainties?