About love, homeland, despair and other existential problems

Syria / Lebanon - 2025

This Project received the World Press Photo X Samir Kassir Foundation Masterclass 2025

I spent years documenting themetaphors, hints, and shadows of truths we couldn't say out loud.
-But now, with the Assad fall, we areliving a dream we once thought was unreal. Yet, we are entering a nightmarethat is lurking around the corner.
This project is about a time that nolonger exists.
At a time, we thought Assad had won.The fighting in Damascus quieted, and the city went into this emptiness ofdefeat. For those of us who stayed, it felt like the end—not just of arevolution, but of hope itself. Still,we "tried" to rebuild, even as disappointment loomed large.

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This project captures the journey of Syrian "secular" youth from different backgrounds and beliefs, who dreamed not just of toppling a brutal regime, but of escaping the suffocating traditions that chained them. When one revolution was lost, we turned to another. We built new communities, created new ideas, and dared to believe that change was still possible. Life, in those fleeting moments, felt surreal—like stepping into a dream.

This didn't last for long, the collapse of the economy and its aftermath was relentless. No jobs, no stability. Migration hollowed out our cities. Survival became our only ambition—day after day, stripped of plans and hope. Communities that had once held us close began to dismantle, turning us once again into strangers in the cities we had called our own.

I left for Beirut in 2023, but even far away, I carried the weight of home, unable to escape the same disappointments that bound me to other Syrians.

Now,standing in this moment of history, I look back and see a world that hasvanished. And a world that is yet to come. What we lived feels like arelic—fragile, surreal, and irreplaceable. We tried to love, even as the worldaround us collapsed.