Nineties Birthday Buffet

Part of a longer-running project called Les Nouveaux Pauvres [En: The New Poor], which examines how upper-middle-class and bourgeois Lebanese families responded to the 2019 economic collapse. This piece is the odd one out technically: rather than improvising, Noémie photographed a real childhood birthday buffet, printed it, and drew directly over it, reworking a failed first attempt in Photoshop until it became the final print.
The buffet itself, she says, was never just food. “I think it was very political, the mothers showing how much they cared, how generous they could be. Look at kids' birthday parties today, it's even more extreme now.” After the 2019 crisis hit, she felt a wave of nostalgia and empathy for parents who could no longer keep up that tradition, and noticed how often that exact image, an overflowing buffet table, turns up in Lebanese family photo albums. “It's my favorite kind of photo to find. Everyone has one.”