Gabriele Basilico (Bilingual edition)

Returns to Beirut by Gabriele Basilico, in the words of curator Giovanna Calvenzi, is the book that should be "definitive" to remember a deep and passionate relationship that has linked Gabriele Basilico to the city of Beirut. Over the years, Beirut has also become one of the central cornerstones of his commitment to photography.

In addition to a long work in the archive of re-reading all that Basilico has achieved, accomplices of the various journeys have also been invited to exercise their memories. The wide selection of black and white and colour photographs is introduced by texts by Gabriele Basilico, Giovanna Calvenzi, Tanino Musso, Fouad Elkoury, Gabriel Bauret, Christian Caujolle, Alessandro Ferrario, Rita Capezzuto, and a Chronology by Farian Sabahi.

Thus, page after page, we discover the work carried out by Gabriele Basilico on the occasion of four photographic missions to Beirut in 1991, 2003, 2008, and 2011.

In 1991, he was involved by the Hariri Foundation and the Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé in a project aimed at the photographic documentation of the central area of the city of Beirut, at the end of the devastating Civil War that had torn the city apart for fifteen years. Accompanying him were five other photographers: Raymond Depardon, Josef Koudelka, Robert Frank, René Burri, and Fouad Elkoury.

Basilico moved in the centre of the devastated and still undermined capital with the gaze that has characterized all his production, attentive to the transformations of the contemporary landscape, to the form and identity of cities and metropolises from an architectural point of view, but above all, social. Since then, he returned to Beirut three more times:

In 2003, on behalf of the architecture magazine Domus, directed by Stefano Boeri, to record the reconstruction of the city through urban views corresponding to the photos taken in 1991.

In 2008, on the occasion of the inauguration of one of his exhibitions at the Planet Discovery Center, he continued to record the reconstruction of the city. Finally, in 2011, the Hariri Foundation called him again to document the rebuilt Beirut, alongside Fouad Elkoury, Klavdij Sluban, and Robert Polidori.

The photographer's eye thus rests on a city that changes in both its appearance and soul, linking itself to that of Basilico, who wrote: "The practice of returning creates a singular sentimental disposition: like waiting for a desired appointment, an awakening of memory for places, objects, people, as if the engine of a machine stopped for some time were rekindled. For Beirut, it was even more."