Christophe Katrib is a multi-media artist. A photographer by trade and practice, he also works with sound and the moving image, making videos, installations, and writing/composing music and poetry.
He graduated in filmmaking in 2000 from IESAV (Université Saint Joseph) in Beirut, working as a DJ and film director in the TV commercials production circuit for a few years. In 2005, he was asked to create the sound design for the art installation “Rue du mot perdu” which was shown in the Hangar at Umam Documentation & Research. After the July 2006 war, he participated in a collective art exhibition entitled “Nafas Beirut” at the gallery Espace SD by contributing photos and writings, and started devoting himself to photography as an art practice. Since then, he has been part of several collective exhibitions in Lebanon (Beirut, Saida, Tripoli, Jbeil) and abroad (Brussels, Copenhagen, Jeddah) with his photos as well as his video and installation work. His images have been published in several local and international publications such as Bidoun, 34 and Alef. He recently started performing and recording his own alternative folk music under the singer-songwriter alias “Cristobal” and his songs currently feature on two compilation albums produced in 2009.

“My approach is mainly meditative, without distancing itself from documentary aspects of the world we are embedded in.  It is based on symbolic stillness where time slows down or stops by zeroing in on daily elements of the environment and human activity, in order to study their sometimes forgotten poetics and the richness of texture. Inspirational roots arise directly from reality, but drift away and transcend it through this elastic process.
I am drawn to the interactions/relations between man and environment, between what is nature/natural and what is urban/urbane, the narrative features of certain places, whether occupied or abandoned, and the intimacy that can develop from the painstaking immersion into a place and/or a person.
Similarly, I often focus on the threshold between interiors and exteriors, silence and sound, stillness and movement, presence and absence, and again, natural and artificial where such boundaries are transgressed and reproduced.”