ArteEast Managing Editor Mirene Arsanios interviews writer, curator and former ArteEast Artistic Director, Rasha Salti about the Quarterly and its history
During the summer of 2015 the murky entanglements of the Lebanese waste economy overtook daily life. It was the summer of the biggest anti-government and anti-corruption protests in years, triggered by the mounting mounds of leaky garbage. These mounds of leaky garbage were destined to become sought after agents of land reclamation, as real estate […]
More than twenty years ago at a United Nations conference on climate change, governments met to agree on a defining strategy in the fight against the weather. As previous attempts at reducing our carbon footprint had been deemed unsuccessful, the new position was a defensive strategy of the utmost rigor. This strategy was “defensive” in […]
Ecological crises such as capital-induced climate change are one of the most important challenges for the contemporary world. In order to challenge such a catastrophic eco-political trajectory, certain assumptions about the institutions that govern us must be recomposed. What lessons can environmentalism and ecological activism learn from the field of Science & Technology Studies (STS), […]
What does war smell like? In response to this question, Reddit member STR8_Shooter remembers Afghanistan as smelling of feces, gunpowder and explosives, adding: “Then you occasionally have wounded, or dead, which is [a] weird smell you can’t really describe, but you immediately know it when you smell it.”[1] It is this indescribable but unforgettable smell […]
Drawing parallels between two distinct narratives in Beirut’s recent history, Marwa Arsanios’ research examines the material outcomes of the neoliberal project that took shape at the beginning of the 1990s, immediately following the end of the Lebanese Civil Wars. Starting from the recent visual and political memory of the garbage crisis that began in 2014, […]
“When I was young, there was a gas station next to our house. From time to time, especially during holidays, my father would bring food to the station workers. One of the employees wore a shirt with the inscription ‘Africa,’ illustrated by a map. One day I asked my Dad ‘what is Africa?’ He told […]
The suffering integral to the state of slavery can be difficult for most people to contemplate, either because owning other people seems too alien or distant to command immediate attention, or because modern contractual enslavement is so prevalent that we struggle to comprehend the nature and extent of our own complicity in it. Thus, while […]
Deserts fascinate me—they have for the longest while, particularly the Sahara. Perhaps, it’s the idea of the existence of life amidst so much aridity and desiccation, or the co-existence of desert and oasis, two states held in tension by an inherent opposition, which mutually heightens their individual essences: the desert becoming more desert because of […]
“[T]o write is, of course, to travel.” Iain Chambers Art is the other of power. It represents the incessant reluctance to conclude and accept the present state of affairs: it is a refusal. The present always engages the past where histories of that past are as potent when they are repressed as when they […]