Love Letter to the Father I Wish I Knew

Magida El-Kassis — Members' Gallery

Love Letter to the Father I Wish I Knew draws from Magida El-Kassis’s family photographic archives to reconstruct the childhood of her father, who left Lebanon at eighteen and rarely spoke about the life he left behind. When she asked about his early years, he offered only fragments, just enough to let her imagination complete the story. She grew up picturing him beneath cedar trees, running through the mountains with his siblings, carefree and light. She also sensed another version: a boy carrying responsibility, growing up too quickly under the weight of circumstance.

Through collage, weaving, and natural dyeing, El-Kassis reworks family photographs to give these fragments a second life. Threads are hand-dyed with materials found across Lebanon, creating a material connection between where she lives and where her family comes from. Weaving becomes a way of reconstructing what is incomplete: bringing together fragments of memory, inheritance, grief and imagination. Something, she has come to understand, is not always complete until it has been broken down and rebuilt.