Rania Matar’s Where Do I Go? documents Lebanon’s women through a question the country won’t stop asking

In psychology, the process of revisiting a charged experience to honour the feeling without being imprisoned by it is known as memory reconsolidation; for Matar, the project started organically after she visited Lebanon following the 2020 port explosion. Observing women working to reconstruct the city, she realised there was a wave of young people who wanted to leave the country, but unsure whether they should. “I saw myself in them,” she says. 

Matar left Lebanon in 1984, when she was 20; these women were the same age now. “My friends who didn’t leave, their kids are leaving. It feels like there’s a sense of history that keeps repeating itself,” she reflects. Over multiple visits, her approach stayed the same – put a call for subjects on Instagram, speak with whoever responded, and build a collaboration from there. 

“I don’t ask for pictures or anything [before meeting],” she says. “If they’re replying, then they’re willing to be part of this, and I figure they’re interesting enough to be willing to put themselves out there.”

Despite the age gap, collaboration bloomed between Matar and her subjects, and their shared memories of the same country. One woman led her to the south of Lebanon, to a gigantic bomb crater in the middle of a gorgeous landscape, and a scene built around sandbags. “I give them so much credit that they’re willing to do this,” Matar shares. 

“We went to this place, and she’s standing on these sandbags where snipers hid during the war. And she was wearing, by her own choice, her mother’s engagement dress. So there were two layers of memory here in some way. I would have never known these areas if she hadn’t taken me there.”

The same woman later took her to another site and told her, ‘I’m part of the land. The land is part of me. I want to be photographed naked in it’. “I’m so honoured that they would trust me to do things like that,” says Matar.