Armando Perna's Hidden Camera Documents Beirut's Dahiye District

Italian photographer Armando Perna (born 1981, Reggio Calabria) has been visually exploring Dahiye, the southern suburbs of Beirut, since 2013. Dahiye is known as the headquarters of Hezbollah and home to about half a million people. It gave its name to the 'Dahiye doctrine' formulated by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, which includes destruction of civilian infrastructure of hostile regimes as a calculated measure. Perna's project, exhibited in 2017 at the Fondazione Pino Pascali in Polignano a Mare (Bari) as part of Planar gallery's #showcase project founded by Antonio Ottomanelli with Anna Vasta, used a digital camera hidden inside a car and controlled remotely via Bluetooth. The method mirrors Google's street view mapping. The artist drove through the area collecting an ordered series of images, forcing limits of possibility and safety to reaffirm the civil role of the artist. The neighborhood has been subject to heavy Israeli airstrikes in recent weeks. The project was accompanied by a text by Christian Caliandro, describing Dahiye as a 'city within a city,' a 'self-ruled area' controlled by Hezbollah and subjected to massive bombing during the 2006 Lebanon war. Perna's hidden device investigated a hidden perception of space, a 'twilight world' embodied by Dahiye and the Palestinian camp of Shatila, compressed between the Shia enclave of Ghobeiri and the Sunni stronghold of Tariq el Jdide.