Embodied Research & Photographic Practice

Over more than six years of repeated travel between Gdańsk and Beirut, I engaged these neighborhoods through presence, walking, and observation. I experienced their streets with my body and senses, witnessing the textures, atmospheres, and rhythms that shape daily life. Living at a distance allowed me a dual perspective: reflective detachment alongside ethical proximity. This tension shaped my photographic practice, where each image became a negotiation between witnessing and restraint, empathy and intrusion. The photographs capture gestures and improvisations that define urban life: a street vendor arranging vegetables and fruits; the aroma of coffee or tea spilling into the street; a barber at work in a narrow shop; a pawnshop owner counting coins; a group of women sharing the street with neighbors of different ages; children moving through narrow alleys; a solitary passerby negotiating space. These moments reveal the intimate relationship between human existence and urban form, the way social life adapts to the constraints and possibilities of the built environment.

Equally, the architectural environment is a mosaic of improvisation and human need. Buildings are layered and heterogeneous: unfinished structures with iron bars, concrete blocks, water collectors on rooftops, tin patches, curtains hung for privacy and sunlight, and street roofs transformed into urban interiors through tents, cables, and awnings. The streets themselves become semi-public spaces, where neighbors share seating, electricity connections, and informal signage, while billboards, electric poles, and street infrastructure intersect with everyday life. These architectural interventions, spontaneous, and deeply meaningful, reveal the ingenuity of residents in shaping livable spaces through improvisation.

Through these photographs, this project transforms research, embodied experience, and memory into a visual narrative. Each frame reflects my architectural background and commitment to understanding space not just as physical form, but as lived reality. Photography becomes a way of translating spatial conditions, social improvisations, and architectural gestures into visual language, revealing the fragile persistence, relational urbanity, and layered existence of Beirut’s margins.

Presented in Gdańsk, the exhibition carries personal and cross-cultural significance. As an architect, researcher, and expatriate, I carry Beirut in my memory while inhabiting another urban context. The exhibition is a bridge, sharing the improvisation, persistence, and rhythms of life in Beirut’s margins while inviting reflection on universal themes: how communities adapt to adversity, how space shapes human interaction, and how marginalized neighborhoods carry memory, identity, and collective ingenuity.