About the project

Aurélie Pétrel’s artistic exploration transcends traditional photography to question the image, its status, its (re)presentation and its production mechanisms. In her ongoing series ‘ Midnight at Roland’s’, she unearths a diary written in Beirut in 1958, recounting the experiences of a woman named Jeanne during the turmoil in Lebanon. Drawing parallels with her own life, Pétrel combines fieldwork, interviews and documentation to create imposing sculptures that reflect the country’s historical crises.

Her works, marked by fragmentation and synthesis, are configured in several versions or “activations”. Precisely planned, they invite the viewer to enter Jeanne’s world and reflect on the role of the individual in collective history. Pétrel’s labyrinthine interventions, representing the passage of time, span different locations and are drawn from her extensive archive of images, collected over 20 years of shooting.