For more than twenty years, the Mekdachi family has travelled the world. Each journey is driven by the same curiosity: discovering new studios in which to record songs, finding inspiring places to photograph and film, and then setting out in search of a basketball hoop.

This search has become a ritual. Not necessarily for the most beautiful court but, more often than not, the simplest.

A stretch of concrete. A few painted lines on the ground. A backboard weathered by time. A metal rim suspended in the air.

Over the years, these courts have become one of the reasons the family travels. They have allowed them to meet people they would never have encountered otherwise. Some stayed only for a game. Others became friends for life. Thanks to them, each new city felt a little more familiar.

These ordinary places hold something extraordinary. They bring people together.

Across the world, basketball courts possess the same quiet power. It welcomes everyone. Age, language, culture, social background or profession suddenly cease to matter. All it takes is a ball for a game to begin, and only a few minutes for strangers to play as if they had known each other forever.

Basketball becomes a language beyond words.

Like music, it allows people to communicate without translation. A pass, a look, a smile, and a shared effort are enough to create an immediate understanding. You improvise, like musicians who do not speak the same language yet somehow play the same melody.

Two different forms of expression, but the same experience: strangers creating something unique together before going their separate ways.

This is the spirit that Lola James Harper calls Hooptime.

The photographs gathered in this book, taken over more than twenty years by Noé, Lili and Rami Mekdachi, do more than document basketball courts.

They tell the story of places that make encounters possible, revealing their spirit of sharing and connection. These concrete spaces become, all over the world, genuine public squares where humanity expresses itself in its simplest and most beautiful form.

They are places where you arrive alone and leave feeling a little less like a stranger.

Every hoop is an invitation. An open circle reaching towards the sky. A promise of connection.

For Rami and his son Noé, these courts have also been part of a more intimate story. Since Noé was five years old, the two of them have made a point of seeking out a basketball court in every new city they visit.

Basketball became a way of understanding each other differently, without necessarily having to speak.

A conversation made of movement, trust, closeness, and time spent together.

This book finds its natural continuation in the feature film Hooptime.

Where the photographs freeze movements in time, the film gives them a voice.

After the passes, the smiles, and the games come the conversations. The men and women met by chance on street courts across the world talk about how street basketball has changed their lives, the friendships it has created, the boundaries it has erased, and the remarkable ability of a simple concrete court to connect worlds that might otherwise never have crossed paths.

Some of these encounters continue far beyond the court, in recording studios in Paris, Beirut, London, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Basketball players who are not musicians become, for the duration of a creative project, musical partners, gradually shaping the film’s soundtrack together.

The music emerges from the same impulse as the game itself: listening, trust, spontaneity and the joy of creating together.

Rami Mekdachi was born in Beirut and grew up between Paris, England, and North America.

The world of music called him with a guitar, a punk-rock band and the raw joy of making noise together. Music taught him how to travel, how to speak without words, how to meet people whose language he did not know. Over the years, Rami developed other languages: photography, cinema, fragrance.

His work explores the poetry hidden in the simple gestures of everyday life. He has traveled around the world with his family, Céline, Lili, and Noé, gathering images, songs, fragrances, and stories that remind us the world inspires dreaming.

Through his films, photographs, and music, Rami seeks to convey a simple idea: in a world shaped by information, precision, and control, we should also take the time to look, smell, listen, dream, and allow ourselves to be transported by the magic and poetry of everyday life.

Together, this forms a rare sensory universe called Lola James Harper, which exudes the gentle intensity of moments that are captured without being imprisoned, and which continue to live on through the senses of the viewer, listener or reader.

His first feature film WITH was awarded for its cinematography, direction, and original score, affirming the scope of his artistic voice, through which he shares his approach to life: “Life is a song we play together.”

Through music, cinema, dance and photography, Lili Mekdachi practices the arts and crosses disciplines in the spirit of freedom that defines her family.

A multidisciplinary artist and contemporary dancer trained at the prestigious Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London after several years at the Paris Conservatory, Lili brings to her photography a choreographic sensitivity, an instinctive relationship to space, balance, and movement dynamics.

As a filmmaker, she was nominated at the Cannes Film Awards for her first short film CRAFT & POWDER and is currently developing her first feature film.

As a composer, she co-created the award-winning original score for WITH and has collaborated with internationally renowned artists Joshua of Seventeen.

As a founding member of Lola James Harper, Lili has traveled around the world with her family, shaping her vision and compositional style.

What defines her visual writing style on her argentic film camera is her singular ability to capture the precise moment when reality becomes cinematic. Her images carry a gentle tension, an equilibrium of bodies, colors, light, and atmosphere, with a choreography that remains entirely organic and natural.

A key element of her visual universe is her relationship with music. Lili enjoys titling her photographs with references to songs from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, pop, rock, new wave, melodies that continue to shape generations. These titles are her way of embedding music within the image.

Her photography floats between reality and reverie, like scenes from a film one feels they have already lived.

A visual artist, musician, producer and athlete, for many years Noé Mekdachi has developed a physical, rhythmic, and sensory approach to creation.

Trained at the prestigious Istituto Marangoni, he builds a transversal artistic language nourished by image, sound, movement, and performance.

As a founding member of Lola James Harper, he has traveled around the world with his family, instilled in him a particular sensitivity to time, color, and the vibration of spaces.

Always engaged in high-level sports practice, Noé conceives creation as a space of precision, endurance, and listening. Sport, like music, hones his innate relationship to rhythm, breath, tension, and balance, qualities that directly infuse his visual work.

He has long shaped the visual, graphic, and color identity of Lola James Harper and is notably the creator of the iconic Palm Tree logo.

Alongside his visual work, Noé is an award-winning drummer, composer, and producer. Alongside Rami and Lili Mekdachi, he composed and performed the original score for WITH. He currently collaborates with an eclectic group of artists, developing music where rhythm, texture, and emotion dialogue with image.

Drawing from a multitude of photographic archives by his family, Noé assembles images with the precision of a film editor. For him, a sequence is built through its color palette, image by image, emotion by emotion, sensation by sensation, deeply embodied and faithful to the spirit of Lola James Harper.