Italian photographer Armando Perna (born 1981 in Reggio Calabria) has documented Dahiye, a southern suburb of Beirut known as Hezbollah's stronghold, using a digital camera hidden inside a car and controlled remotely via Bluetooth. His project, initiated in 2013 and exhibited in 2017 at the Fondazione Pino Pascali in Polignano a Mare (Bari), creates a street-view-style mapping of a neighborhood that has been heavily bombed by Israeli forces, most recently in the past weeks. The work was promoted by Planar gallery, founded by Antonio Ottomanelli, with Perna and Anna Vasta as part of the #showcase project.
The project matters because it reclaims the civil role of the artist by documenting a space that is technically unmapped, unperceived, and often treated as a 'white hole' in the network of references. Dahiye has given its name to the infamous 'Dahiye doctrine' formulated by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, which explicitly approves the destruction of civilian infrastructure in hostile regimes as a calculated measure. Perna's work forces viewers to see what is hidden—beyond barriers, checkpoints, and surveillance—turning the act of mapping into a political and perceptual intervention in a contested urban territory.