Flowers of Evil

When Etienne Krähenbühl, went to Lebanon in 2000, he realised what the war could have meant. The country was a field of open wounds and he was fascinated, attracted as much as appaled by it. In the town of Aley, he walked on a ground covered with artillery shells. He exposed a shrapnel fragment to the sunlight piercing through the branches of a lone cedar tree, and decided to capture this moment. He would fix these murderous fragments upon long flexible stems and would turn them into flowers or cobs, erecting them as a field made of a thousand flowers of evil, suspended in the air memory.
The texts offer a poetic, narrative or analytical reflection on the artwork as well as on the history that resonates with it, bringing it back to memory. A land, a memory, countless shattered possibilities : a matter of saying and a way to testify.

This book makes us feel the weight of the lebanon tragedy, not as a documentary but as a lived reality.

Etienne Krähenbühl is a swiss artist and a sculptor. The artist works with the four elements to transform the surface of his sculptures that also display time as another of these elements.

David Collin His first book, “Phantom Train”, was published by Seuil in 2007. He is the co-author of several collective publications. He is also a producer and director at Radio Suisse.

Imane Humaydane is a lebanese anthropologist. She did research on the missing of the civil war. In 1997, she wrote about women caught up in the war in “Baa Mithl Beith Mithl Beirut“.

French version :  978-2-88474-099-9