An Article by D. M. (833 words, 4 min. read)
To step into Stéphanie Saadé’s exhibition at the Sursock Museum is to walk, quite literally, over memory. The floors of the galleries, once a family home, now carry the reconstructed surfaces of another: the artist’s childhood apartment in Lebanon. “Traversée des états”(Terrazzo Tiles) spreads out beneath your feet, not as a set piece, but as lived ground. Ceramic, terrazzo, and carpet converge in silent dissonance, forming a home that no longer exists, rebuilt not in nostalgia, but in fragments, like a language spoken after forgetting its grammar.
There are no walls. Only the marks where they used to be.
This is a show that lives in aftershocks, not only of architecture, but of trauma, exile, and return.
A House After the Blast
On August 4, 2020, the port of Beirut exploded. The city shook, and with it, the fabric of countless lives unraveled. For Saadé, who had long been navigating the drift between Beirut and Europe, this catastrophe crystallized something long accumulating: displacement as a permanent condition. In the months and years after, she began working from what was available: residues, remnants, substitutions. In exile, she used what she could hold in her hands. Back home, she turned her parents’ house into a studio, a memory bank, a source of material.
This exhibition is the outcome of that process of turning grief, disorientation, and longing into compositional logic. Not to explain or redeem the rupture, but to inhabit it.
Dust as Memory, Not Decay
The exhibition’s title, The Encounter of the First and Last Particles of Dust, takes on a mythic weight. Dust is not presented as the end state of decay, but as a beginning, a portal. In one of the most haunting works, curtains salvaged from her family home are embroidered with the 37 routes Saadé took as a teenager, between 1995 and 2001. These paths, once routine—visits, errands, school, escapes—now shimmer on the fabric like veins. The curtains do not fit the museum windows; they pool on the ground like displaced time.
Dust gathers here not as residue, but as witness.
When Time Spirals, Not Flows
Saadé’s relationship with time is never linear. In It is…, a massive circular calligram inscribed by hand, the seconds of an hour spiral outward in quiet revolt against standardized time. The lines wobble, the ink trembles. Writing becomes not a record but an effort; each second scratched into cardboard, one by one, for months. What emerges is not a clock, but a wound made visible. A refusal to let time pass unnoticed. A fatigue that speaks of waiting, of longing, of endurance.
As curator Anne Davidian writes, “Each work sets its own conditions of unfolding.” Here, time does not tick. It presses.
Fragments that Refuse to Disappear
What makes Saadé’s work so deeply affecting is not just its personal nature, but the way it elevates the minor, the overlooked. In Petits Papiers, scraps of her daily life—tickets, drawings, tape, stickers—are arranged like a private archive of ephemera. Stickers repurposes adhesive residues left behind by her daughter. These are not just sentimental traces. They are affirmations of life continuing, persisting, in spite of.
In the terrazzo panels (Traversée des états), shards of Fairuz albums are embedded like fossils, albums that once played through Lebanon’s golden eras and through its darkest hours. Vinyl becomes stone, sound becomes pattern. It is an act of transmutation where memory becomes mineral.
No Narrative, Just Presence
This is not a show that tells a story. It does not offer the comfort of a beginning, middle, and end. There is no resolution, only resonance. Saadé’s practice leans closer to notation than narration. Her gestures are small but loaded. A metal bar cut and welded back together (Scarred Object). A photograph covered in gold leaf, obscuring the child it depicts (Golden Memories). A poem measured in centimeters, stripped of meaning (Word Count).
These works do not speak. They hold. They remind. They touch.
A Home Rebuilt from Absence
Ultimately, the Sursock exhibition is not about returning home. It is about what happens when home is no longer what it was, when the physical space remains, but everything within it has changed. By reproducing the floors of her childhood home inside the museum, Saadé collapses past and present into a shared surface. It is a radical kind of intimacy, letting visitors move freely through her remembered space.
But this is not a replica. It is a haunting. A placeholder. A way to inhabit memory without being trapped in it.
The Personal is Cultural, Symbolic, and Material
This exhibition is a study in how an artist transforms limitation into form. Without access to her studio, without the familiar structures of making, Saadé turned to what she had: dust, scraps, time, distance, ache. She took the things that could not be said and built with them.
Because when catastrophe seeks to erase, what persists matters.
