“We will investigate different forms of mapping in the city, as a spatial exploration that will redraw, rescript and translate the experience of the city through different methodologies. Mapping here is understood not merely as an organization of data uncovering certain systems of relation or power, but more as an imaginative engagement with the city, where the participants can actively intervene and use different methods of research and exploration depending on their interest; walking, registering their environment through sound, drawing or filming, assembling and interpreting their material. The participants can either depart from a specific idea of what they would like to document, research and map or just look for it by wondering in the city, observing their surroundings and mapping their mobility, between private and public spaces.”

98 Weeks is a Beirut based research project.

“After the city has been defined during the emergence of the metropolis it is now most essential to redefine the city not merely as a product of size and mass mutations of human settlement but rather through the dynamics of the very basic elements that constitute the city- a city redefined by investigating place - our workshop aims to experiment with methodologies to investigate place; by deconstructing place into narratives.”

Interruptions is an independent non profit publication created as an unofficial space to collect individual experimental readings on the Middle Eastern city engaging multi disciplinary approach to understand further logistics of the aesthetic, the cultural and the semiotics of the environment we form, reform and are shaped by. The publication is made of singular contributions of local, regional and international enthusiastic individuals experimenting with different methods to represent, analyze and criticize what makes the city and the built environment of disciplines as art, architecture and design.

“‘Every witness is also an actor. All actors are also witnesses. All witnesses are redactors.’

The KD Vyas Correspondence Vol. 1 is an attempt to render a unique exchange between Raqs and the figure of a retired redactor who goes by the name of KD Vyas. The person or entity named Vyas, in his letters to Raqs, originally delivered to the Dead Letter Office in New Delhi, makes a claim to being the compiler of the Mahabharata, an epic originally narrated in Sanskrit, probably around 300 BC in the northern part of South Asia. The letters themselves function as provocations and indices for Raqs’ continuing investigations on the theme of ‘declining time’, on the protocols of the production and transmission of narratives, on the vexed questions of the verification and authenticity of being, and on some methods for remaining sane in the early years of the twenty first century.

Day 2: WORKSHOP – The workshop will look at the use of what Raqs calls ‘minor media’ within their practice of engaging with contemporary realities through art work and other continuing investigations. Here, participants may use found materials, notebooks, memory work, narratives, photographs, collage and other strategies to construct small, dense works that can be very layered. After an introductory session in which participants introduce their work and interests, two discussions will contextualize the theme of the workshop: the relationship of the artist with the city (as well as how to think about city space as an artist) and the usage of documentary material in contemporary cultural practices.”

Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 by independent media practitioners Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Based in Delhi, their work engages with urban spaces and global circuits, persistently welding a sharp, edgily contemporary sense of what it means to lay claim to the world from the streets of Delhi. At the same time, Raqs articulates an intimately lived relationship with myths and histories of diverse provenances.

“It is different because it is fundamentally different.

‘Working the Pixel’ is generally described very vaguely as working with Pixeltechnology and mass media. A more specific definition is the massive intrusion into mass Pixelchannels with widely available standard technology such as email, telephone or mobile communications, mobile phones, sms, or with conventional media such as flyers and posters; additional to that, a good twist in the story told…with such an pragmatic and easy proactive modus operandi – in the end only courage, intelligence and basic technological know how is necessary – you can achieve enormous reach and frequency in this age of the totally networked space.”

“UBERMORGEN.COM is an artist duo created in Vienna, Austria, by Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard. Behind UBERMORGEN.COM we can find one of the most unmatchable identities – controversial and iconoclast – of the contemporary European techno-fine-art avant-garde. UBERMORGEN.COM’s work is unique not because of what they do but because how, when, where and why they do it. The permanent amalgamation of fact and fiction points toward an extremely expanded concept of one’s working materials, that for UBERMORGEN.COM also include (international) rights, democracy and global communication (input-feedback loops). “Ubermorgen” is the German word both for “the day after tomorrow” or “super-tomorrow”

Screening of the film “All is well at the border” from 1997 and presentation of Zaataris current research project on one of the characters of his film. The film is set in the occupied zone of South Lebanon.

Akram Zaatari is a video artist and curator who lives and works in Beirut. He also is the co-founder of the Fondation Arabe pour l’Image, Beirut.

Trying to outline a narrative of cinema in Syria, its means and its language, within the wider context of Syria’s contemporary history, taking a glance at its milestones and identifying what young filmmakers can do today to accomplish their projects.

Orwa Nyrabia is a documentary film producer and director and one of the organizers of the DOXBOX Festival in Damascus.

“Imaging processes” in this sense are not limited to two dimensions. We can assume all instances of reproduction, regardless of mediums, to be instances of “imaging”. Based on this definition we can reflect on all sorts of “products” as images of other entities. Platonic ontology deals with this notion in a philosophical level, founded on concept of “idea”, defining the material world and all objects of sense as imperfect and unstable reproductions of the original source.
From this point of view, all sorts of cultural influences and exchanges between various cultures or civilizations might be read as a form of “imaging”, where a relatively “original” phenomenon is reproduced - with a certain degree of exactitude - within another context. Reproduction of values, forms, functions and symbols is a constant “imaging process” ensuing in and between various cultures. Partial reproduction of attributes from a relatively “original” entity on an independent other one is the essence of “imaging” processes, regardless of the technologies, methods or mediums involved. From this view point, we can read architecture as a kind of multilayered image, including “imaged” information originating from diversified sources and some of these layers can be more clearly associated with reproduction of phenomenon from other cultures. Effects of globalization, in terms of increasing pace of exchange and communication between cultures, can also be traced in architecture as aesthetic aspects, functions and programs are migrating between various contexts.

We are going to look at Damascus and its space, like an archaeologist or maybe a detective, who tries to investigate these “imported” or “imaged” elements, specifically in the light of globalization discourse. We will pick up samples from the context of Damascus, including these “images” in the form of space, specify their origins and analyze their effects.
These effects can be traced in many different aspects of architecture that can be categorized as follows:

A.Processes of creation and their backgrounds:
Definitions of architecture, urban planning and design / Roles of architects and urban designers/ Architectural education / Architectural literature

B.Products:
Functions and programs “imaged” on the existing context / “Imaged” aesthetic features / imported technologies and their influences on architecture and urban spaces /

C.Feedbacks:
Influences of “imaged” or reproduced architectural phenomena on emerging lifestyles / Influences of “imaged” spaces on other media including films, photographs, paintings and literature /

Although the domain of the discourse is intrinsically widespread, we will be able to collect pieces of the puzzle and put them together in order to construct a new “image”, helping us to have an enhanced understanding of the whole condition.”

Kianoosh Vahabi is a Tehran based architect, artist and writer.

“How the Myths ought to be put together if the Making is to go right” - Literary influences and persistence of myth in the construction of Lawrence of Arabia icon.

“In my lecture I would like to frame the figure of T.E. Lawrence as icon of modern hero, in which we can see the confluence of literary suggestions, ancient myths, and orientalist view (in the meaning stated by E.W. Said).
In particular I would like to fix my attention on the literary components of the icon, without forgeting that T.E. Lawrence is one of the great much-discussed personality of the XX century. Many books have been written about him and more than seventy years after his death historians and biographers still debate animatedly about him.
Recents political events in Middle East have brought again the historians’s attention on T.E.Lawrence’ historical figure and consequently on his role of british intelligence agent during the Arab Revolt in 1916-1918.
Imperial agent or friend of the arab liberation cause? Traitor or liberator? Double-crosser or triple-crosser?
If to the ambiguity of the character we add the image of fervid “orientalist” proposed by Edward W. Said, we can take Lawrence’ figure as a paradigm of the asymmetric relationship between Europe - or in general Western World - and Near East.
However I wouldn’t like to stress Lawrence’ historical, political or military vicissitudes, but rather the literary image of “Lawrence of Arabia”, that is his heroic icon.
I think his myth and epic adventure is an exellent example of the connection between literature (in particular epic literature) and history. As T.E.Lawrence, through his image and writings, has been also one of the main builders of his own myth, his figure can help us to understand how history and literature can influence one another (H => L => H => L).
My intent is to investigate Lawrence’ icon and to trace the mythic and literary elements that formed it, marking a backwards path that can reach the most ancient poems of mediterranean and european culture. The matter is to see until where the shadow of the hero can lengthen, maybe to find out that from the labyrinth of the past centuries ancient poets - with the ambiguous language of poetry - had warned us against the hero’s doubleness.
Finally, as I ‘m persuaded we are in the presence of some western deep cultural “topoi”, so far functional to the white western suprematism, it’s consequently possible that deconstructing the hero’s mask, tracing his thousand faces, we take a step forward in a walk of knowledge and liberation from the rethoric of clash of civilizations that rules the present.”

Wu Ming is a band of five italian writers, formed in 2000. Four of the members of WM were formerly authors of the historical novel “Q” (1999), signed with the pseudonym Luther Blissett, published in thirteen languages and thirty countries. “Wu Ming” is a chinese word, it means either “anonymous” or “five names”, it depends on how you pronounce the first syllable. This year, in 2008, Wu Ming 4 alias Federico Guglielmi published his first solo novel “Stella del Mattino” about T.E. Lawrence.

“This project is about looking at how, through sound and body language, we can question and practice this identity, understood as an unstable nomadic state, crossed over by a multiplicity of tensions and traversed by layers of intensities. Identity is then for us an act that only exists in contrast, in context of a multiplicity of other events, always on the verge of being something else. Identity understood as a tension, as a movement, can then only exist on the fringe of its disappearance, of its fading into strangeness. Instead of talking about general politics, we work within the frame and context of our micro political, micro economical situation. We build our space and language with what we can carry with us, and what the situation carries for us.
We use small contact mics and black cables. We work on fragile positions, both sound and body wise; fragments of postures, deconstructed images and details of violence. Sometimes we choose not to intervene, not to use the mics, not to use the cables, not to produce any sound. Sometimes we stay for more than two, three minutes, letting the image come to another life, overflown and contaminated by other gestures or sounds. Sometimes we stand still, and provoke a cliché, the projection of a violent moment: torture, trauma, depression, imprisonment, quivering… all kind of fragilities that run under the idea of identity. Sometimes within this violence and tension something breaks up, a slender movement, a song. Sometimes we bind each other to the cables, sometimes we let go.”

“WE INSIST is born in Madagascar, with the meeting of three artists from three different backgrounds. Two dance artists, Mia Habib, Norwegian, Rani Nair, Swedish, and one sound artist, Jassem Hindi, French.Together we realized how much we had in common, in our taste for unstable artistic postures, in our methods to adapt to foreign or new cultures, in the way we stood in places we didn’t know, spaces we had to investigate and try to feel ‘at home’ for a moment.”