La dernière visite, Eliot Nasrallah

What can you do when you can't go back to your homeland?

Ever since he was a teenager, Eliot Nasrallah has dreaded the idea of one last trip to the land of his origins. Lebanon's political and economic instability is frightening, for the "goodbyes" it portends. His grandfather and his family made these hand signals, the fear at the tip of their fingers of a country that is giving in to its destruction. He knows the lack and the disappearance through their stories, the inaccessibility of a place, the ineffable powerlessness, those pains in the chest when they tell them. Between 2015 and 2019, Eliot photographed his time in Beirut. Images to extract the real, a sort of pebble slipped into the memory box so as not to forget anything, to have them always and beyond. Pieces, extracts, whole worlds.

2020. Beirut explodes before his eyes for the first time. The idea of a last journey is no longer an idea. The noises are silenced by the sound of N's few words, those of a fading memory, of a country that illness is gradually silencing. In the days following the explosion, Eliot repeats this photographic gesture, the fear at his fingertips of a statue that time would take away. The image to get closer to him, gently, in the moments they have left. Lebanon is out of reach, but N. is still there. Eliot's comings and goings at home accelerate, and he knows that the daily life they have left is precious. To still feel the warmth, the smells, the colors, the sounds of the country he carries within him, to still breathe in his life and what unites them before he fades away. The last visit narrates this close link between Lebanon and N. Between these two monuments that images allow us to look at forever.

A suspended memory, a crumbling country. A bitter parallel, where what seemed eternal turns out to be ephemeral... An imaginary return to Beirut with images as the only bulwark, a meager remedy for oblivion. How can images prolong or rewrite access to a memory that also seems momentarily suspended?

Eliot Nasrallah lives and works in Paris. His research focuses on the processes by which images appear and disappear. Moving back and forth between silver and digital processes, his practice explores various reproduction techniques based on experiments with the photographic medium. Between alternative prints, bookish objects, soundscapes and the design of handmade devices, his work attempts to reveal different plastic and narrative possibilities linked to the representation of memory. While the series of images he deploys sometimes tend towards a form of mysticism and abstraction, the gestures of rapprochement that activate them seem to participate in the montage of a memory in perpetual construction. From the personal archive to the image-document, his work questions the capacity of images to bear witness to their own histories of making. His project "La dernière visite" won a photographic prize as part of a collaboration between Passepartout and Yogurt Magazine. In 2021, his book "Août 2020, Cher Journal" was nominated for the Kassel Dummy Book Award. Since 2022, he has been teaching photographic and editorial practices at the Duperré School. He is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs.

Self-publishing, 2023
Text in French, Risography printing
Soft cover
16 × 15,7 cm
120 pages + 4 pages insert
0.15 kg