There is a silent yet powerful force that drives history, art, economics, even science: desire.
Not a simple need, nor a fleeting impulse. It is a constant, ever-changing, often contradictory energy.

In the Symposium, Plato placed it between the human and the divine, a striving toward what one does not possess.
In Greek myth, to desire was to challenge the gods. Prometheus, by stealing fire, embodies the human desire for knowledge, power, and emancipation.
Desire, then, is ambivalent: a force that pushes forward, but also a moral burden. It is the fire that illuminates and burns.
Over time, tales of desire have multiplied. The Middle Ages codifies it as temptation. The Renaissance celebrates it as a vital impulse. Romanticism transforms it into sublime suffering. The contemporary era spectacularizes and fragments it.
In this issue of LYF, Tales of Desires is a journey through invisible territories where desire transforms into image, body, landscape, ritual.
It cannot be confined to a single definition because desire changes, mutates, moves between surface and depth, between need and beauty, between what is missing and what is remembered.
It is one and multiple. It insinuates itself into the folds of everyday life in different forms: prayer, obsession, dream, utopia. It is a never-ending tale, unfolding in a thousand stories, each with its own voice, its own rhythm, its own illusions.
Each artist involved tells a different story of desire.
Some shout it loudly, some protect it in silence, some sublimate it in a powerful visual language.
In this LYF issue, desire is not just passion or lack. It is memory demanding to be heard, beauty claiming to be seen, spirituality seeking form.
And so, for Aïda Muluneh, desire is visual resistance: in her photographs, the female body becomes a symbol of identity, memory, and power, demanding a gaze free from stereotypes.
For Rebecca Aldernet, desire manifests itself as everyday nostalgia: in her intimate and luminous paintings, beauty becomes fragile, close, and profoundly human.
For Elen Bezhen, desire lies between nature and spirituality: veiled female figures and mystical landscapes evoke an inner world that seeks harmony, transformation, and sacredness.
For Pupa Neumann, it’s a suspension between presence and absence: her female figures wander in a daydream, poised between melancholy and ineffable beauty.

To cross and intertwine our Tales of Desires, we created a shooting as a parallel narrative, a visual poem that touches and reinterprets each tale in a symbolic and sensorial way.
In each shot, desire takes shape – it appears as a gaze lost in somewhere else, as bare skin exposed to the light, as a gesture that swipes against something without ever fully grasping it.
In LYF Tales of Desires, glasses become visual micro-narratives, extensions of desire itself. Created by artists and designers working across art, craft, and fashion, glasses become mask and revelation, boundary and passage, they are tools through which desire takes shape and vision.

Our LYF Tales of Desires doesn’t provide answers.
On the contrary, it raises questions, welcomes ambiguity, listens to the silence that follows every impulse. Desiring, ultimately, is an act that exposes us, that makes us vulnerable, but that profoundly defines us as human beings.
Desiring is also imagining. And imagining is already a great act of freedom.