Traversée des états (Crossing States) recounts, through the prism of a mineral material, the aesthetic upheavals that have accompanied Lebanon’s modernization. 
 
Terrazzo is a flooring technique of Venetian origin. It is made from debris, primarily waste from the marble industry, mixed with a binder (lime, cement, or more recently, resin), which is then poured and polished. This technique flourished in the 1920s during the Art Deco period in Europe before spreading abroad in the 1940s. For Stéphanie Saadé, terrazzo is emblematic of Lebanese homes built at the dawn of the 1950s. This includes her childhood home in the Lebanese mountains as well as her grandparents’ house on the outskirts of Beirut. By revisiting this omnipresent material, the artist delves into the fundamentals of her aesthetic vocabulary and artistic sensibility - one that is also shaped by the music of the Lebanese diva Fairuz, which is transmuted into the panels. 
 
These panels are created through a unique process: fragments of vinyl records, cassettes, and compact discs from key Fairuz albums have been incorporated into a matrix. By displaying terrazzo vertically, Saadé reveals the conceptual and graphic dimensions of this material, which has always been considered environmentally friendly. The framework of the artwork’s production connects the subject, rooted in Lebanon’s history, to contemporary local problematics. 
 
The Fairuz album used in this piece is Loulou (1979), a reissue of the eponymous musical play composed by the Rahbani brothers and originally performed in 1974. Loulou belongs to a period of upheaval and an important historical sequence in Lebanon—the 1960s and 70s—an era of artistic and cultural flourishing that preceded the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. 
 
On the panel, the album fragments are arranged chronologically, with the vinyl at the bottom, the magnetic tape in the middle, and the CD at the top. They create a gradient of colors reflecting the different physical media through which this music has materialized, and that marked the history of the music industry. Traversée des états (Crossing States) does not so much tell the story of an era’s disappearance as it does of a metamorphosis. What interests the artist is the slow, painful yet fertile process of transformation of habitat, that is shaped by economic, social, historical, and political shifts in Lebanese society and the world. 
The surface usually most overlooked—the ground—becomes the focus of this new project.