Lebanon-based photographer Laura Menassa, who has been working with the charity ActionAid, often wondered what items she would take if she had to leave her home in an emergency.
“The question kept growing inside me,” says Menassa. She started to ask friends and family what items they would take in similar circumstances.
They gathered objects and Menassa placed them on their bed or on the floor. Trophies showing what the word “home” meant to them.
Following the October 7th, 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel and subsequent conflict in southern Lebanon, this “project was no longer based on imagination, but on reality”, she says.
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When she asked women who had been displaced by the war what they could take with them, they all said utilities and documentation; the basic necessities.
Most did not have the luxury of gathering memories or sentimental belongings, like Manessa’s friends and family had done previously.
“When fleeing is no longer hypothetical but a matter of survival, choices are reduced to what is necessary,” she says.
More than one million people have been forcibly displaced from southern Lebanon. Many found refuge in Biel (the Beirut International Exhibition & Leisure), a former leisure complex in Beirut.
One woman displaced by the war, Suma, sought refuge there. After being asked to move their tent while authorities cleared areas of the camp, Suma and her sister Shahida rebuilt their shelter from scratch using plastic covers and wood.
“There was an airstrike,” says Suma. “My husband was injured by pieces of the collapsing building and he died from his wounds.”
Suma was only able to save a baby bottle and milk for her daughter Fatuma and a watch and makeup for herself.
