That late afternoon in a restaurant, a woman sat facing me. I’ll like you to keep in mind, as a necessary preface to this account, the loneliness that occasionally overwhelmed me towards the end of my stay in Rabat. Contrary to what I hear from people who encounter loneliness in a foreign country, for me […]
“On a day as any other day, all of our memories would become significant only in retrospect, our first memory was marked by the day setting off to start with the worst of all evils.”—We Began by Measuring Distance (2009) I read while standing in front of We Began by Measuring Distance, a video work […]
In the summer of 2015, Mansur Aziz sent a text by Vilém Flusser, titled Betrayal, to a group of artists and activists. We were developing a series of lectures and interventions on representation at a youth camp. The series was another iteration of a project whose first round was centered on media practice and its […]
For its eighth edition, the Jerusalem Show responds to the theme of Return with the two-part exhibition Before and After Origins. Works from over thirty artists and cultural heritage collections are presented across five venues in the New Gate neighborhood of Jerusalem’s old city, including Jerusalem Show commissioning institution the Al Ma’mal Foundation. The project takes […]
Translated from Arabic by Lina Attalah Much translation is dependent on its economic context, but also on the political situation from which it emerges. In Egypt, there has been a renewed interest in knowledge production since the 2011 revolution, but also a sinking economy. New possibilities, but also new limits, are being felt out. In […]
“The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence.” – Adrienne Rich In ancient times, language followed a peculiar rule combining contraries. One word could have two opposite meanings; “strong” could mean powerful or weak. Also, two opposing […]
A call for writing; Lina Attalah February 10, 2011. The 17th day of the Tahrir sit-in. At that point, we had arrived — through hope and resistance– to the conclusion that Hosni Mubarak would leave power that day. It was the only future we could imagine. You often camped in our newsroom and that day, […]
The excerpts of conversations dotted and hyperlinked across this Fall issue of the Quarterly are transcriptions from a workshop developed with journalists, editors, and copyeditors from Mada Masr, an independent online Egyptian newspaper founded in June 2013 and based in Cairo. In September 2013, we spent an afternoon holed up in Mada’s office debating the changing meaning […]
Naira: Revolution is a process but in language you refer to it as an event. If you refer to the 18 days as revolution in the past tense, “when the revolution happened”, and “after the revolution”, “INAUDIBLE WORD 4:56 after it’s finished”, it is a very different notion of reality. Lina: I am growing very […]
Maha: ‘Propaganda’ is another word. I struggle with that in culture sometimes. Whom am I to label when something is propaganda or not. Sometimes I used it more specifically in regards to anything state-produced, or the cultural protest or whatever it may be. But I get a bit confused of when to use it or […]