Erka Shalari: The exhibition opens with Today I Felt Like a Change in Perspective, a small-scale work. Why did you decide to pair it with the romantic symbol of Paris?
Stéphanie Saadé: Today I Felt Like a Change in Perspective is a postcard of the Eiffel Tower, sent from Paris, where I currently reside, to Galeria Tiziana di Caro in Napoli. It reads: “Today I felt like a change in perspective.” Unusually, the sentence, address, stamp, and postmark appear on the image side rather than on the back. The Paris post office agreed to play along, and the card was delivered successfully despite its unconventional use. Written in a moment of introspection, the sentence gains another layer of meaning in the exhibition context: through the show and the works presented, the public is invited to shift their perspective as well. Each time, I choose a postcard depicting a symbol of the city. Here, perhaps the most iconic: the Eiffel Tower. This emphasizes the obsolete nature of the postcard as an object, which in this context finds a renewed potential use.
ESH: The works on view trace a decade from 2014 to 2025. When seen together, where is the viewer carried? What kind of narrative unfolds through this body of time?
SS: The works presented in the show actually correspond to three distinct temporalities. The first period ranges from 2014 to 2019. During this time, I explored subjects such as my childhood in Lebanon. In Golden Memories (2014), a childhood photograph is entirely covered in 24-carat gold leaf. The actual memory is undocumented and lost in the process, yet instead of fading, the photographic paper acquires the qualities of gold: perennial and unchanging. The title carries an element of surprise and subtle irony, as these memories were “golden” despite taking place during the Lebanese Civil War. The process transforms the photographic image into an abstract monochrome surface, which becomes a mirror or screen for the public to project their own memories onto. Starting from a personal point of view, the work thus opens outward to engage others. Other works from this period include Mariage (2014), four fragments of keys welded together, uniting four unknown locations, which hangs as if indicating directions next to The Four Corners of the World (2016), a seemingly empty frame made from wood sourced from North, East, South, and West, following precise instructions given to a framer in a specific town and country. Travel Diaries (2014–2019) are travel documents marked by the creases formed during journeys, highlighted with 24-carat gold leaf – the most worn parts of these already valueless papers, again pointing to obsolescence like the postcard. Together, these works reflect my early preoccupations with orientation, travel, the properties of metals, and welding as a process that unifies while simultaneously sacrificing part of the individuality of each element.
![Stéphanie Saadé, Les Quatre Coins du Monde [The four corner of the world], 2018, legno del Nord (Siberia), legno del Sud (Dalmazia), legno dell’Est (Slovenia), legno dell’Ovest (Austria), carta / wood, paper, 93 x 93 x 4 cm. Variazione 3/3 / variation 3/3. Ph: Danillo Donzelli. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Tiziana Di Caro.](https://www.les-nouveaux-riches.com/wp-content/uploads/interview-stephanie-saade-02.jpg)
world), paper, 93 x 93 x 4 cm. Variation 3/3. Ph: Danillo Donzelli. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Tiziana Di Caro.
ESH: Your works trace much of Lebanon’s contemporary history, a history marked by countless turbulence, though “turbulence” feels far too mild a word for all that has unfolded. You articulate about these by using crafts like Aghabani embroidery on cotton cloth, or inscribing lines onto wood with brass …
SS: The work you mention, We’ve Been Swallowed by Our Houses (2020) belongs to the second temporality present in the show: beginning with the revolution in Lebanon on October 17, 2019, and extending until the Beirut Blast on August 4, 2020, with the economic collapse in Lebanon and the Covid-19 pandemic, both locally and internationally occurring in between. During this period, we experienced an extraordinary sequence of political and historical events, followed by catastrophe, which forced a reconsideration of familiar concepts such as space, time, and home. I conceived this work during the pandemic, when lockdown confronted us with an excess of time and also a lack of space. I measured my Beirut apartment, the same one later destroyed in the blast, and drew a map of it, transforming it into a human-scale labyrinth. It was then embroidered on a tablecloth custom-made to the size of my former dining table using the Syrian traditional Aghabani technique, composed of chain stitches and spiral patterns, available in Lebanon thanks to the presence of Syrian refugee women, paradoxically, those who had lost their homes. The work expresses the feeling of a shrinking, inaccessible outside space in parallel with the densification of the only accessible interior space of the house. Imagine getting lost inside your own home.
The title evokes home as a belly, drawing on sacred and secular stories such as Jonah and the whale or Pinocchio: being swallowed as a pregnancy in reverse. Once I first exhibited the work, I had more or less joined the status of these refugee women, as my home and studio had been destroyed by the blast, and the idea of “home” had returned to utopia.
ESH: What about the third temporality, and how does your current Paris studio, as well as the former one in Beirut, next to the harbour, shape your work?
SS: The third temporality begins after the Beirut Blast of August 4, 2020, and the wave of exile that followed, including my own. Representations of my former Beirut studio and my current Paris studio coexist in the exhibition. The former appears in the embroidered floor plan of We’ve Been Swallowed by Our Houses (2020), the latter, just a bit further, in Stage of Life (2021), where a bed linen set used in my adolescence and kept by my parents is cut into strips and sewn together to correspond to the perimeter of my Paris apartment.
Personal objects like this bed set become metaphors for elasticity, physically mutating to translate new time-spaces while referencing the past. The floor plan is intentionally only partially unfolded, so, as in Golden Memories, the work opens to the public rather than simply providing information about myself and my environment. The unfolded parts reveal the corners and angles of an apartment, contrasting with the folded ones that retain the soft quality of the fabric. The installation resembles an undone bed, the bed as a potential shelter, like an apartment can be. Observing these two works shows how the studio itself has mutated. In Lebanon, it was part of my domestic environment but had a dedicated space inside it; in Paris, it has no dedicated space. Simultaneously, this means that the studio has invaded all of the apartment! This informs recent works such as the collected flower petals of Flower Terrazzo (2024) or the socks in Pyramid (2022).
ESH: When it comes to showing your works, what is important to you? How did you relate to the gallery space, and what kind of dialogue do you like to establish between the works and the place where they’re shown?
SS: My exhibition at Galeria Tiziana di Caro is titled Our Love Is My Studio. In it, works from the three different temporalities mentioned above have the opportunity to engage in dialogue simultaneously, while also conversing with the incredible space of the gallery and the city of Naples, visible through the gallery’s high windows. This dialogue takes place silently within the walls of the first floor of Palazzo De Sangro di Vietri, a palace built in the 16th century in Piazzetta del Nilo in the historical centre, while just outside, the dynamic city bulges with noise, activity, and life. The title hints at the shift of the studio from a material and professional space in Beirut to a domestic space in Paris, but not only. Another shift is that the studio is no longer only a physical space but also a mental one, which I carry within me. In this mental space, there are thoughts, hopes, desires, and feelings. Our Love Is My Studio suggests the possibility of working inside a thought or inside a feeling, such as the feeling of love. The title also insists on the importance of love in times of rupture and uncertainty. The word “our” implies reciprocity, a connection I hope will be sparked by the works themselves and by the way they reach out to the public, with the exhibition opening a space for potential connection. This is the case even in a small work such as Today I Felt Like a Change in Perspective, which could resemble an invitation card or serve as a way to establish a “correspondence” with the gallery and its visitors.
ESH: What motifs or elements tend to repeat in your work? I’m particularly drawn to recurring forms, like the idea of perimeter, or when the title of a show reappears—such as Building a Home with Time, first presented in 2016 at Counter Space in Zurich and later in 2022 at Centre Pasquart in Biel.
SS: In my show now, beyond the way I placed each work in connection with one another and with the space, some connections emerged on their own. In the first room, We’ve Been Swallowed by Our Houses engages with the tiles of the gallery, which are the same type of cement tiles that were in that same former apartment! It’s as if the floor plan had found its tiles again, and the context is making it come alive once more – including the Napolitan breeze that enters from the gallery’s windows and animates the piece of fabric.
Building a Home with Time (2019) is also a good example of the way the works interact with this specific space. For the first time, I’m displaying it wide open. It’s as if the 2,832 beads – which correspond to the number of days between my birth and the official end of the Lebanese Civil War – were embracing the space, the terrazzo and cement tiles that compose that same floor and contain similarities with the floors I grew up on during my childhood in Lebanon. There is a lot of implicit back-and-forth happening, as our tiling and flooring techniques and materials in Lebanon, so emblematic of Lebanese floors, originate from Italy. As you noted, some titles are very meaningful to me, such as Building a Home with Time (2019). The first version of the work was a construction made of 2,832 bricks and cement, proportional to my childhood room. The viewer can enter it and experience a space that actually incarnates a period of time, the part of my life that I shared with my country’s tormented history. The title Building a Home with Time (2019) uses the verb “to build” in the present participle, as a hint that building a home, whether it is the physical act of doing so or, more importantly, creating the feeling of being at home, is inscribed in time. Moreover, it suggests that it is an ongoing process, possibly a never-ending one, or one that keeps having to be started again. But home, like the studio, could also exist inside a memory, a feeling.
ESH: In a critical text about your work Anissa Touati and Mohamed Amer Meziane note that your practice is concerned with fragmentation. What draws you to fragmentation, and how does this condition unfold in your current show Our Love Is My Studio?
SS: Fragmentation is something that I was born into, as I was born in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War. I’ve been observing it and its effects on the architecture, the landscape, and people, including my own self. I’m interested in it as a shape, as a pattern, and also for its conceptual dimension. How can the fragment constitute an entity by itself, but also how can several fragments constitute a new whole. In Alphabet (2022), each of the 26 letters composing it are written by a different person, encountered during a walk. The alphabet is a whole that unites all these different individuals, present at the same time in the same place (a street, a public garden, …). Evoking the topic of fragmentation and layering naturally brings to mind Pyramid, which I’m simultaneously exhibiting at Tiziana di Caro and in the 18th Istanbul Biennale, curated by Christine Tohme. Pyramid is an ensemble of textile sculptures, each composed of stratified layers of standardized clothing items in all sizes. The garments are new, making them immediately relatable and allowing visitors to situate themselves on the pyramids or recall a former (younger) or future (older) self, activating memory and imagination. The works, through their forms and process, function as reverse archaeologies, with the smallest, or oldest, layer at the apex.
They evoke organic formations that materialize growth and time, such as tree bark or stalagmites, again inverted. Pyramid is informed by my experience of motherhood: one can visualize a child’s growth through their clothes, which quickly become too small. Between stages, one can naturally superimpose the old and new garments, physically measuring the centimeters gained or to be gained. We are traversing a profoundly difficult era, and our work as artists, whether it responds directly to it or not, is conceived within this historical and political context, making it inseparable from it. The Pyramids, composed of generic garments – ones that could be worn from birth to death – are displayed horizontally, mostly on the ground; together, they reconstitute the shape of an individual, but can also evoke a body scattered in space.
ESH: Would you describe these gestures of care, archiving, mending, transforming, (rebuilding like with the flower terrazzo) as forms of resistance to rupture?
SS: The works in which I’ve addressed the question of fragmentation most recently are definitely the works revolving around terrazzo. Terrazzo is a flooring technique of Venetian origin. It is made from debris, primarily waste from the marble industry, mixed with a binder (lime, cement, or more recently, resin), which is then poured and polished. In Lebanon, it is emblematic of Lebanese homes built at the dawn of the 1950s. This includes my childhood home in the Lebanese mountains as well as my grandparents’ house on the outskirts of Beirut.
In my show at Tiziana di Caro, the work reflecting this research the most is Flower Terrazzo (2024), in which the petals of flowers bought or received by my daughter and me in our apartment are collected and dried, then assembled on paper. It also brings us back to notions that recur often in my work: caring for the small, the neglected, including surfaces of the architecture such as the floor, which is not cared for in the same way as other surfaces of the architecture, as we step on it with the lower part of our bodies. This overlooked surface, much like the discarded petals of flowers, becomes the very subject of my artworks. The transmutation that happens in this work is also that of reclaiming a pattern corresponding to the floor, and making it again from something fragile: flower petals, something that couldn’t be more delicate and that could definitely not bear being be stepped on. There is also a shift from the horizontal to the vertical, which turns what resembles a piece of floor into a painting to look at, to admire. In that act of care, also for what was alive and beautiful (flowers) and that is not anymore (dry petals), there is an act of resistance indeed, like in many other works in the show. This care is most necessary in the unbearable times that we’re traversing.
Exhibition: Stéphanie Saadé – Our Love is My Studio
Exhibition duration: 16.10 – 06.12.2025
Address and contact:
Galleria Tiziana Di Caro
Piazzetta Nilo, 7, 80134 Napoli
www.tizianadicaro.it
Stéphanie Saadé – www.stephaniesaade.com, www.instagram.com/stephanie.saade
Stéphanie Saadé was born in Lebanon in 1983. She lives and works between Beirut and Paris. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and has been an artist-in residence at the Van Eyck in Maastricht and the Cité des Arts in Paris. In 2023, she was selected for the Accélérations residency at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The works created during this residency were acquired by the museum and included in its permanent collection. Among her solo exhibitions are: The Encounter of the First and Last Particles of Dust at the Sursock Museum, Beirut (2025); Building a Home with Time at the Centre Pasquart, Biel/Bienne (2022); The Travels of Here and Now at the Van Loon Museum, Amsterdam (2019); Crossing States at Parc Saint Léger (2018) and Destiny Without a Beholder at Maison Salvan (2018), both in France. A duo exhibition, Intimate Geographies, was held at Marres, Maastricht (2021).
Her work has also been exhibited at institutions and events such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAXXI, Rome; 18th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul; Sharjah Biennial 13, Sharjah; Punta della Dogana, Venice; Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris; M HKA, Antwerp; MOCA, Toronto; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; Beirut Art Center, Beirut; Villa Empain, Brussels; Het Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch; Mucem, Marseille; La Criée, Rennes; National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík; Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo; Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard, New York; Marres, Maastricht; POUSH, Aubervilliers; Ystad Konstmuseum, Ystad. Her works are featured in various collections, including those of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques), France; Frac Franche-Comté, France; Fonds d’Art Contemporain–Paris Collections, France; MAXXI Museum, Rome; Centraal Museum, Utrecht; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; and the Saradar Foundation, Beirut.