PORTRAIT.- In the media shadow of her sister, the journalist and host Léa, Louma has been pursuing a discreet but remarkable journey in the art world for years. Director of the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, she has just remarried, during an intimate ceremony in Ghent.
In the Salamé family, there is Léa, the star journalist, omnipresent on radio and television. And then there is Louma, his youngest, whose face is less familiar with the general public, but whose trajectory in the world of art is just as remarkable. At 43, love smiled at him again. The forties has just married, as evidenced by several photos posted by its elder on its social networks, during an intimate and discreet ceremony held in Ghent, in Belgium. “”Such a beautiful wedding Sista (What a beautiful marriage, my sister) “, wrote the presenter of” What a time! ” On France 2. The opportunity, for us, to draw his portrait.
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Because Louma Salamé does not owe his growing notoriety to this recent event. Since 2016, she has been at the head of the Boghossian Foundation, installed in the Villa Empain in Brussels, a sumptuous Art Deco building which she has been able to transform into a real cultural dialogue laboratory. Under its impetus, this heritage place has dusted its walls, opening up to the world and decompartmentalizing the disciplines so that the eyes meet.
A childhood marked by exile
Born in 1981 in Lebanon, in the midst of a civil war, Louma is the youngest of a siblings of two. Three years separate her from Léa. The two sisters grow up together in a Jesuit family, between an intellectual father and high -ranking diplomat, Ghassan Salamé – former Minister of Lebanese culture and advisor to the UN – and a mother from a line of Armenian diamonds, Mary Boghossian. If their first years are synonymous with happiness, their native country is plunged into an armed conflict – which will last until 1990 -, forcing the family to exile: at only 5 years old, Louma left Lebanon to settle in Paris. “We were sleeping in the bathtub, my sister and me, because it was the only window without windows, said Léa Salamé in” Passage des arts “on France 5, in 2020. However, the risk of sleeping in a room that has a window is that a shell explodes the windows and that the children are injured.”
Did Louma draw from this early departure the roots of his vocation? Has watering from its lands planted the seeds of a deep cultural anchoring and its openness to the world and its forms? Unlike Léa, who knew very early on that she would become a journalist, Louma would have sought her way longer. But when she discovers art, she says, something will light up. “The discovery of art was my true birth,” she said in 2018 in 2018 in The echoes .
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In adolescence, she then trained in the fine arts and the decorative arts of Paris, before opening up to the international: an internship at Christie’s in London, another at the Guggenheim Museum in new York. It was at Mudam, the Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg, that it signs its first contract. The rest is up to her commitment: she is called upon to direct the communication of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, then that of the Museum of Modern Arab Art in Doha. After a passage through the Institute of the Arab World in Paris, she finally sets up her suitcases in Brussels, where she took the direction of the Boghossian Foundation in 2016. Polyglot (she speaks French, English, Arabic and Spanish), who better than her, to make this place an exceptional place?
“Proud of my sister”
At the Villa Empain, Louma has been working for several years to make the place a new world artistic crossroads, a space for meeting, transmission and reflection. “Our mission is to attract a younger audience, to seduce Dutch speakers, to strengthen the social and educational role of the Foundation,” she said in an interview with the magazine Be Perfect. A work often praised by his elder: “proud of my sister who manages this place with passion and panache”, wrote Léa Salamé in 2022, after Louma had made the headlines M, the world magazine.
On the private side, Louma Salamé has also just started a new chapter in her life by marrying for the second time, according to information from our colleagues from Gala . However, the identity of the new spouse has not been revealed. Before, she had shared the life of Count Raphaël de Montferrand, journalist and producer, with whom she had a son, Léonard. The couple had united in 2011. “We take turns to take him to school, each our turn,” she confided several years ago to Rectoverso About this shared life. Today, it is another hand that she holds.
