ESSAYS & CONVERSATIONS
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This is How We Work Together
Read the Room #3: Self Organizations: Tips & Tricks for Working Together
Supplement published in 2024 | Commissioning editors: Krystel Khoury and Mai Abu ElDahab
Copyedited and proofread by Jenifer Evans | Design by Siwar Kraitem
Read the Room is the title of a series of booklets published by Mophradat about questions that affect us collectively as a community. “Us” is people everywhere who call the Arab world home, are concerned with its present, and through a wide variety of art practices aspire to take part in shaping its future. This supplement was written following multiple conversations conducted with various groups working together, connecting the different threads and layers in one collective conversation.
short text | written in English
published as part of the virtual exhibition «Norient City Sounds: Beirut» curated and edited by Rayya Badran | 2022
In this short poetic prose, fictional entries of a personal diary reflect on the soundscape of Beirut post 2020.
essay | written in Arabic and in French
published as part of a special issue on the circulation in (the) film archives, co-edited by Nour Ouayda and Ghada Sayegh
in the online film magazine Hors Champ | 2021
Following a residency at the Arsenal Film Archives in Berlin during the summer of 2019, I make an usual encounter: a copy of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akermann which had turned completely red, apparently for “chemical reasons”. However, I have multiple other explanations for the dramatic redshift.
حوار مع غسان حلواني : عن العلاقة المتشعّبة بين الفرد والمجموعة
إن هذا الحوار هو جزء من مجموعة “مدونات حول العمل الجماعي”، من تمويل مفردات
أُجريَ الحوار التالي في شباط ٢٠٢٢ في مَنشِن (زقاق البلاط، بيروت) مع غسان حلواني (مخرج، نجّار)، العضو في مجموعات عدة تعمل في مبادرات وفضاءات جماعية مختلفة، منها الفضاء الجماعي مَنشِن، ومشروع روضة الأطفال الجماعي مدرسة الغابة، والحملة الأهلية للحفاظ على الدالية وأرشيف المفقودين. بدأ الحوار بشكل عفوي بين الصديقين كارين ضومط وغسان حلواني، ومن بعدها كتب غسان ملخّصاً عن كل تجربة على حدة، نشاركها في النص على شكل حواشٍ. إن هذه المقابلة ومجموعة الملاحظات المرفقة بها تتيح لنا رصد بعض الظروف التي قد تدفع الفرد، في مدينة مثل بيروت، إلى اللجوء إلى الجماعة كطريقة من طرق الصمود في وجه التحولات والخسارات المتتالية التي يتعرض لها سكان المدينة.
short text | in collaboration with Nour Ouayda | Arabic, translated to English by Suneela Mubayi
published by the online platform The Derivatives for Beirut Art Center | 2020
Months after the violent blast which hit the silos of the port of Beirut on August 4 of 2020, this piece is a conversation between the two friends C. and N., characters which had appeared for the first time in the film one sea, 10 seas, about the vibrations generated by the sudden occurrence of certain events, reverberations which penetrate the body, meandering through it, never fading away completely.
short text | written in Arabic, translated to English by Lina Mounzer
published on the online platform Perpetual Postponement for Ashkal Alwan | 2020
Months after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which also marks the slow exhaustion of the 2019 uprising in Lebanon, I am invited to write on the theme of perpetual postponement. I want to tell my friend Liwaa Yazji who now lives in Berlin, about a peculiar scar on a film strip I found in the Arsenal Archives in the summer of 2019. I also want to know how she could bear the loss of images and texts, a loss she had experienced twice since she left Syria. But first and foremost, I want to share with her my personal interpretation of Mohamed Soueid’s enigmatic title: I am in Camelia | أنا في الكاميليا. So I write a letter to Liwaa.
short text | written in French, translated to English and Spanish
published by Punto De Vista Festival, Spain | 2020
Helga Fanderl makes intimate and stricking short 8mm films. Each screening of her films is a unique composition of various films, a singular poetic moment. Helga invites me to a special screening in her former Raüm fur Film (Room for Film) in Berlin, and after returning to Beirut, where I am thrown into the momentum of a social uprising, I write a letter to Helga.