Almond Blossoms and Beyond
2018 | Book Design | Student Project | American University of Beirut
Almond Blossoms and Beyond (original Arabic title: كزهر اللوز أو أبعد) is a collection of poems written by Palestinian poet/author Mahmoud Darwish. In my personal interpretation, I focused on the last four poems: Exile I, II, III and IV in which Darwish tackles the idea of exile, identity conflicts, leaving and coming back, the in-between, the sense of home, etc. I wanted to link his poems to what we lived as Lebanese people, and the identity conflicts that emerge in our fragmented society. I used photographs of old abandoned building located in Beirut, as a symbol of our loss and grief, and I placed the text in-between the pages, to refer to the growing internal identity crisis. The book can be looked at in different ways: only the photographs, or only the text, or both, and thus becomes like an interactive object.
