Returns to Beirut by Gabriele Basilico, in the words of the curator Giovanna Calvenzi is the book that "should be [...] "definitive" to remember a deep and passionate relationship that has linked Gabriele Basilico to the city of Beirut, which over the years has also become one of the central cornerstones of his commitment to photography. In addition to a long work in the archive of re-reading of all that Basilico has achieved, "accomplices" of the various journeys have also been invited to exercise their memories. The wide selection of black and white and colour photographs is introduced by texts by Gabriele Basilico, Giovanna Calvenzi, Tanino Musso, Fouad Elkoury, Gabriel Bauret, Christian Caujolle, Alessandro Ferrario, Rita Capezzuto and a Chronology by Farian Sabahi.
Thus, page after page, we discover the work carried out by Gabriele Basilico on the occasion of four photographic missions to Beirut in 1991, 2003, 2008 and 2011.
In 1991 he was involved by the Hariri Foundation and the Lebanese writer Dominique Edde in a project that aimed at the photographic documentation of the central area of the city of Beirut at the end of the devastating Civil war that had torn the city apart for fifteen years. With him are called five other photographers: Raymond Depardon, Josef Koudelka, Robert Frank, Rene Burri and Fouad Elkoury. Basilico moves in the center of the devastated and still undermined capital with the gaze that has characterized all his production, attentive to the transformations of the contemporary landscape, to form and identity of cities and metropolises from an architectural point of view, of course, but above all social. Since then, hewill decorate Beirut three more times. In 2003 on behalf of the architecture magazine Domus, directed by Stefano Boeri, to record the reconstruction of the city through urban views corresponding to the photos taken in the 1991. In 2008, when on the occasion of the inauguration of one of his exhibitions at the Planet Discovery Center continues to record the reconstruction of the city. And finally in 2011, when the Hariri Foundation called him again to document the Beirut rebuilt together with Fouad Elkoury, Klavdij Sluban and Robert Polidori. The photographer's eye thus rests on a city that changes in its appearance and soul, linking itself to that of Basilico who will write: "The practice of returning creates a singular sentimental disposition: like waiting for a desired appointment, an awakening of memory for places, objects, people, as if the engine of a machine stopped for some time were rekindled. For Beirut it was even more."
