Home is where Teta was

Here is a snippet of a large body of photographs and videos taken inside the emotionally and psychologically shifting confines of my grandmother’s house in Hadath, Lebanon. Capturing the complexities of family roles and affection when Death approaches

If you listen closely, you can hear her breathing, between the clock in the background and my camera’s tics in the foreground.

This is how the project began. We couldn’t communicate how we usually did, so I took my camera and wanted to show her our reflection. We sat there contemplating ourselves. A frame with just the both of us. It was comforting, it was simple. This went on each time for many minutes, sometimes people intercepted and joined, but the frame always came back to the both of us as I was sitting with her in her bed. Just like when I slept over as a kid. This process seemed to take her mind off of her state. And brought us back to the simplicity of love and life and presence.

Needless to say, that this was my favourite part of the project, one so intimate, one that infused time in the reflection of our bond.

In fact, I had been living with my grandmother “Teta” since I got out of high school. But in 2017, while I was away on an exchange program everything changed, she had a stroke, became bedbound and lost the ability to communicate. This event had a profound impact on the dynamics of our household, with the central focus shifting to her bed. During this period, coinciding with a time of quarantine and significant crises in Lebanon, I discovered a means of attempting to reconnect with her through my lens. What started as a means to spend intimate time with her turned into a documentation of a family anticipating loss. Titled “Home is where Teta was”, I put myself in a future perspective, trying to encapsulate the essence of what would be missed once she passed away, which unfortunately materialized in 2022. Observing my grandfather and my own mother adapt to the role of caregiver, tending to the person that used to do so for the entire family, and the challenges of trying to communicate, I gained a heightened understanding of the underlying emotional layers associated with witnessing a loved one’s decline due to illness.

With this project, I refused to reduce my grandmother into the passive, inactive role of a person who is defined on her dependency on others to survive – a role Arab women are usually cast into with financial dependency to their husbands and families. Indeed, I wanted to capture the co-existence of her dependency on others with her bursts of light and joy. To make sure we remembered that she kept on sharing that feeling with me, with us, inside and outside the frame. Lebanese grandmothers occupy the space of the home, with much agitation, and concern for everyone’s wellbeing. My grandmother’s moving feet, clicking clacking around our corridors, suddenly, from one day to the other, were silenced. So, I wanted to give her back agency to occupy space again, and therefore, my every photographic frame.