I Am Folding the Land

Catherine Cattaruzza's solo exhibition I Am Folding the Land is on view at Beit Beirut in Sodeco, Beirut, from 16 October to 29 November 2026. The Institut français du Liban presents the show; its vernissage on 15 October included a reading by Ryoko Sekiguchi. The work is a photographic installation of tall, narrow colour landscapes shot on film that expired in 1992. The show is open Wednesday to Sunday, 12pm to 8pm.

The series follows the three main seismic faults that run through Lebanon. Cattaruzza travelled along them with a film camera, military maps and geological surveys. She photographed the ground that lies over the faults: soil, both arid and wooded, rock and roads. The Institut français du Liban reads these landscapes as a record of fractures that are at once geological, political, historical and intimate. Its text calls the result a "géologie du politique".

The date on the film is part of the work. The organiser presents 1992 as a turning point after the war in Lebanon. In that year, it says, a political, economic and social order took shape that would end in the country's collapse. Decades past expiry, the film chemistry has shifted. Many frames are stained or streaked with colour. In one picture a band of red and orange light hangs in a deep blue sky above dark ground; the same image fills the exhibition poster.

Cattaruzza made I Am Folding the Land in 2022 for the Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles, with support from the town of Port-de-Bouc, where it was shown that summer. There the photographs stood on narrow backlit panels reaching from floor to ceiling. In the same year she self-published a book of the series, with 33 photographs and texts by Ryoko Sekiguchi and Jean-Michel Vecchiet. The series also appeared in the group show Shifting Crossroads | Beirut Contemporary in Milan, from March to July 2026.