Photo exhibition by Fabio Bucciarelli
Presented by the WARM Festival, in partnership with Gallery 11/07/95 and JP “SARAJEVO”
Sarajevo City Hall, June 30 – July 14, 2025
In Occupied Territories, award-winning photojournalist Fabio Bucciarelli turns his lens toward Palestine and Lebanon, two regions where the meaning of “occupation” extends beyond geopolitics or military presence. Here, occupation becomes a distortion of time and space, a daily struggle navigated not by maps, but by moods at checkpoints, the randomness of rules, and the burden of imposed control.
The exhibition features photographs from Bucciarelli’s long-term work across Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Lebanon culminating in moments of grief, resistance, and everyday survival. From the intimate silences inside a pediatric burn unit in Beirut to the eruptive rituals of funerals-turned-protests in Gaza, Bucciarelli captures the human cost of displacement, loss, and enduring defiance. These are not detached observations; they are encounters witnessed with care, patience, and an ethical commitment to presence over intrusion.
Occupied Territories is not just a photographic record. It is a visual inquiry into the mental and emotional states of communities shaped by historical rupture, most notably the Nakba (1948) and the Naksa (1967), and by the renewed violence that followed the war in Gaza and the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon in late 2024.
Presented as part of WARM Festival 2025, and designed by Lejla Hodžić, this exhibition invites viewers into an alternate geography: one where freedom is fragmented, adolescence is interrupted, and resistance is carved into the landscape of daily life. It asks a simple but disquieting question: how would we move, speak, love, or even breathe, if we lived in an occupied land?
