GEORGES YAMMINE

In Little Boy, Georges Yammine brings together objects that seem to belong to opposite worlds, allowing their proximity to speak before their meaning is fully revealed.

A child can build a world from almost nothing. A few colored pieces become a house, a road, a city, and then something else entirely. Everything remains open to possibility. Into this familiar landscape of LEGO bricks, miniature trucks and vivid constructions, Yammine introduces objects that follow a different logic. Bullets and spent casings, worn and deformed by a history left largely unspoken, interrupt the colors and smooth surfaces of childhood, carrying with them the weight of another reality. At the heart of this encounter lies a quiet tension between the innocence of a child’s impulse to build, imagine and play, and the adult capacity to destroy.

Yet these two worlds are never placed in direct confrontation. Toy trucks carry ammunition as though it were sand. Bright structures rise beside accumulations of metal. A childhood hero appears blurred behind the scarred surface of a projectile. There is something absurd, even humorous, in these scenes, and it is precisely this lightness that makes them unsettling. Through repetition, objects that should never belong together begin to coexist almost naturally.

Violence is never shown directly; it is suggested through what remains. Hundreds of casings become a field, a pattern, almost a landscape. Seen from above, the constructions evoke maps, cities or uncertain territories, while fragments scatter across the ground until the boundaries between play and reality begin to blur.

These imagined landscapes also subtly echo Yammine’s photographs of Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon, a place shaped by layers of history and memory. Yet the work is not tied to a single geography. It reaches beyond a specific place, reflecting on how childhood can exist alongside the traces of histories it did not create; yet it is forced to endure.

A quiet rhythm runs throughout the series. Objects accumulate, circulate and reappear; trucks carry and unload; forms repeat and transform. Perhaps informed by Yammine’s relationship to music, this repetition gives the photographs an almost playful cadence, even as their materials lead us somewhere more unsettling.

Little Boy inhabits this fragile territory between innocence and violence, lightness and gravity, imagination and memory. Two worlds come impossibly close without ever fully becoming one. Between them remains the persistent gesture of building: the possibility, however fragile, of imagining something beyond what has been left behind.