My practice is in the process of rediscovering relationships.
The last years of crises in Lebanon emphasized the urgent need as artists to collaborate together and across disciplines, to explore and relearn about ecosystems of interrelationships, so as to found more autonomous futures. In a world where ways of being are predefined, art brings forth an invitation to interact between bodies, materials, spaces, and situations, beyond the preconditioned, and thus triggering new possibilities for our imaginations. Whether through film, music, drawing, performance, or puppetry, the medium I choose is the way in which I converse with a context in order to reach moments of transformation.
In 2012, I began my outward practice through the Naked Wagon, a mobile platform for street collaborations, responding to the lack of public spaces in Lebanon. The wagon set me on a journey of mapping constellations between impulses, communities and movements.
Today, whether I’m performing on the streets with Zayraqoun, coordinating projects and thinking through self organization and structures, designing art programs, or creating artistic experiences, I question relationships between societies and land; how the arts can open and transform our sensorial, perceptive abilities of remembrance, undoing destructive patterns and reweaving anew? How can it connect us crossing over our divisions? How can it help us rewrite narratives that alter our perceptions of separation?
How we relate to land is how we relate to each other, and the futures we co-create intrinsically depend on how we perceive these relationships.
-Dima Mabsout
Contact: dimamabsout@gmail.com
CV
2012-2015
THE NAKED WAGON
The Naked Wagon was built to provide a mobile platform that contextualizes a public street or sidewalk into a creative space. On and around it, the space becomes a point of free exchange and focalization, of conversation, collaboration and performance.
The first wagon was created in collaboration with the People’s Utility Bicycle Project in Glasgow; The second, in collaboration with el-Yafta poetry group in Lebanon; and the third in Central Saint Martin’s studio, London. The wagon has collaborated with indivduals, organizations and groups the three countries. More documentation here.
Performance Residency and Seed Fund Grantee at
BEIRUT BODIES IN PUBLIC
organized by Ella Parry-Davies and Eliesh SD
PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE AT BBIP
CONTESTING THE ILLEGAL PRIVATASATION OF BEIRUT’S SEAFRONT.
CONTESTING THE ILLEGAL PRIVATASATION OF BEIRUT’S SEAFRONT.
REPETITION COMPULSION
2013 - Sound Performance Series
Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
This series of perfomances center around the repetition that structures an addiction. The soundscapes are produced live, using a loop pedal that manually layers sound through repetition. Each soundscape has a narrative that emerges from a conversation between the Apollo and Dionysus of my mind.
The Following booklet accompanies sound pieces from live performances with the loop pedal. Each page corresponds to a track listed below.
FLEEING AND FORGETTING
RESEARCH / FILM / PUBLIC INTERVENTION
IN COLLABORATION WITH ELLA PARRY-DAVIES
What is the relationship between the Syrian fleeing the war and the Lebanese trying to forget the war? How does that play out in public space?
Short Film: Our Children Hold our Secrets (4:36)
THE WORK CULMINATED IN
︎ Street interventions
︎ Long table discussions and exhibition about the research at Mansion, Beirut.
︎ A chapter written by Ella about the work titled ‘Still Lives’: Syrian displacement and care in contemporary Beirut’ published in the book p.177 Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance
︎ Street interventions
︎ Long table discussions and exhibition about the research at Mansion, Beirut.
︎ A chapter written by Ella about the work titled ‘Still Lives’: Syrian displacement and care in contemporary Beirut’ published in the book p.177 Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance
[TEXT ACCOMPANYING WHEATPASTES]
The war never existed. No one died, no one got hurt or displaced. No homes got destroyed. No one went missing.
For the post war generation, this is what we have evolved to believe- or forget.
To remember the war is as mythical as to believe that Beirut was once a big garden that blossomed every spring. Scents of roses everywhere, not of trash- so potent that it drove people mad. Gardenias, Lilacs, Lavender drowned the streets of Beirut and ate up all the sidewalks with their greenery. People were drunk off the fumes. Alas, with the modern commerce of Beirut, this scene did not go unnoticed. Soon, every bush became privatized, exploited.
The rose market was monopolized and passed on to our children as they present the perfect profile for the trade.
See also Flower Kids.
This project was supported by
Performance Studies international (PSi),
The war never existed. No one died, no one got hurt or displaced. No homes got destroyed. No one went missing.
For the post war generation, this is what we have evolved to believe- or forget.
To remember the war is as mythical as to believe that Beirut was once a big garden that blossomed every spring. Scents of roses everywhere, not of trash- so potent that it drove people mad. Gardenias, Lilacs, Lavender drowned the streets of Beirut and ate up all the sidewalks with their greenery. People were drunk off the fumes. Alas, with the modern commerce of Beirut, this scene did not go unnoticed. Soon, every bush became privatized, exploited.
The rose market was monopolized and passed on to our children as they present the perfect profile for the trade.
See also Flower Kids.
This project was supported by
Performance Studies international (PSi),
THE LIFE OF A MARKER
(IN 93 MINUTES)
2017 - performane, ink on paper
Harvard Graduate School of Education
This is a book. Please scroll through its pages.
SPIRACLE
Spiracle: /ˈspʌɪrək(ə)l/ noun ZOOLOGY an external respiratory opening, especially each of a number of pores on the body of an insect, or each of a pair of vestigial gill slits behind the eye of a cartilaginous fish.
A Collaoration with Rami Chaine
2021
Commissioned by the Relief Center at University College London to embody the experience of living in Lebanon amidst the crises through, as part of their conference Working in Crisis: Innovations, Possibilities and Limitations of Research in a Volatile Lebanon.
The balloon revealed an expressive potential for inflation and deflation, its elasticity, and its relationship with breathing. Enacting a form of ritual, depicting the process of our transformation into neutral, immobile creatures who lose the independence of their decision while their possibilities of subsistence and the horizons of their aspirations become more and more limited.
Performers: Dima Mabsout and Rami Chahine
Videography: Mauricio Yazbeck
Editing, violin and voice: Dima Mabsout
2020 - Film (29 min)
Beirut
The night of August 4th 2020, and for the 12 days following, I process the aftermaths of an explosion that left half of Beirut in ruins. From the streets and into the intimacy of people’s homes, I film to process, how a catastrophe can bring a whole society to work together with a common vision, rebuilding a city that continues to destroy itself.
Music backdrop by Rami Chahine and Chebl Saade.
THE FILM WAS FEATURED IN A COMMUNUNITY FUNDRAISING EVENT
ORGANIZED BY FRIENDS IN CATE HILL ORCHARD IN VERMONT, USA.
THE MONEY RAISED WAS SENT TO SELF-ORGANIZED YOUTH GROUPS IN BEIRUT
TO FIX BROKEN DOORS.
CATALYTIC ACTION
ongoing - Architecture and Participatory Development
Catalytic Action is a design studio and charity that works to promote human rights through the use of strategic and innovative community-led spatial interventions.
www.catalyticaction.org
The children outside this picture sit in the school yard and look into the site of construction, about to take a dive. It is a hot summer's day in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, and the children, coming from surrounding refugee settlements, find refuge at their school.
Above them is the mosaic piece they have been working on for the past couple of days, every child in the school has painted a tile. The mosaic reads Fursa, that is Arabic for chance. As a school-term, Fursa translates to 'recess or break'. In the every day, Fursa is 'chance'.
Fursa is the name of the playground we are building. The students, months before the construction took place, participated in its design, drawing and modeling their vision of what they'd like their playground to look like. The work of Catalytic Action in building this playground, holds the children's expression and values as the foundation of thought, design and architecture.
During construction, the same children are present and participate in bringing the playground to life.
KAN YA MAKAN
A program by Catalytic Aciton
Kan Ya Makan (Once Upon a Place) is a design-build program based on storytelling, artistic explorations and spatial interventions, initiated after the August 4th port explosion in 2020. With the Karantina public garden damaged and most children deeply scarred, the program had several aims: to explore and reimagine spaces of safety mentally, emotionally and physically; through this process, to renovate the park with the children and rebuild a loving and caring relationship with the space; to advocate for the park to be open to the public and in the hands of the community.
Most public parks in Lebanon are not accessible due to corruption and a general lack of respect for the common goods. This program feeds into a larger movement of reclaiming public spaces run by local civil society groups.
As a resident artist and educator from CatalyticAction’s team, I have been designing, directing and leading the program on the ground since the start, creating crossovers between Zayraqoun, other artists and cultural groups based on the emerging themes as the program evolved.
Through art, theatre and filmmaking we co-created the ‘Hawiya’ (means ‘bin’ in English) parade. Children created their protest signs with messages of “Happiness, Care and Play”, they custom painted the wheel barrel, created the chant, and filmed one another as we walked around the neighbourhood's public spaces with the aim to #CleanUp and inspire others to join us. Through the Kan Ya Makan كان يا مكان program, we have been working with children to tackle important issues they raised in relation to the care of the neighbourhood’s #publicspaces.
'Kan Ya Makan' program introduces storytelling, imagination and play, inviting the children of Karantina to reimagine, reconstruct, and reconnect with the physical and nonphysical spaces they inhabit. In this video, the children venture to help the newly planted trees live and grow tall by adding canes harvested from their neighborhood.
HORSHNA FOREST SCHOOL
Horsh Beirut & Baabda Forest
I was an educator at the school between 2019-2022, participating in co-creating the curriculum, writing stories, imagining nature based activities that respond to the children’s curiousities, with the specific role of guiding the weekly “Music Jams”.
Horshna is the first (and so far only) forest school in Lebanon led by Dahna Abou Rahme. It is run by a team of educators who, with a community of families coming from social and cultural activist backgrounds, are seeking alternative models of education and values for the upbringing of our children and of the future generations of the region.
The school is located outdoors, and we meet daily, rain or shine, in the green spaces and forests of Beirut and its surroundings. This allows for our children to engage in free play and exploration of our natural environment, developing an empathetic connection to our land and a knowledge of local plants and animals.
Connection to place is connection to the body, to language and to culture. Arabic is our main language, and our curriculum is inspired by creative and revolutionary traditions that challenge the status quo of oppression, gender inequalities, and social and environmental injustice. We create and engage in songs and stories from local and world cultures, that respond to children’s lived experiences and their evolving identity exploration and social dynamics. With an open and supportive space of exploration, our children are encouraged to observe, reflect, and act according to their own and authentic curiosites. We believe in the importance of mentoring in life skills and developing a sense of responsibility and agency to ourselves, to each other and to the land and place we live in. This bond is essential to continue to pass down from one generation to another to live in a more humane and sustainable way on our land and planet.
The school is located outdoors, and we meet daily, rain or shine, in the green spaces and forests of Beirut and its surroundings. This allows for our children to engage in free play and exploration of our natural environment, developing an empathetic connection to our land and a knowledge of local plants and animals.
Connection to place is connection to the body, to language and to culture. Arabic is our main language, and our curriculum is inspired by creative and revolutionary traditions that challenge the status quo of oppression, gender inequalities, and social and environmental injustice. We create and engage in songs and stories from local and world cultures, that respond to children’s lived experiences and their evolving identity exploration and social dynamics. With an open and supportive space of exploration, our children are encouraged to observe, reflect, and act according to their own and authentic curiosites. We believe in the importance of mentoring in life skills and developing a sense of responsibility and agency to ourselves, to each other and to the land and place we live in. This bond is essential to continue to pass down from one generation to another to live in a more humane and sustainable way on our land and planet.
2019-present
ZAYRAQOUN COLLECTIVE
We birthed Zayraqoun in 2019, during the Lebanese uprisings, from the collective will to explore new ways of co-creation, self organizations, sharing of resources.
We aim to create and innovate opportunities for closeness to people where we can rethink reality and relationships through transparency, music, movement, visual arts, circus arts, play experiences, puppets and strengthening our relationship with the earth.
Zayraqoun activates the right to emancipation of thought and body in an educational context and in public places through marches, performances, interventions and workshops.
Rehla Ila (Journey to).. Khabarkan
Street performance about bread, collapse and the need to redefine the ways in which we live. Part of the Sidewalks festival in Hamra, Beirut, December 2022.
Rehla Ila (Journey to).. Terdad
Street performance created from the collective memory of the explosion, in Beirut. Part of the Cultural Revival festival in August 2021
Rehla Ila (Journey to)..
The first of a series of perfomance parades around the themes of nomadism, community and transformation. A work developed through a mentorship with Zoukak Theatre, December 2020.
Curriculum Development
In collaboration with Buzuruna Juzuruna farm and Jibal NGO, we participated in creating a nature based educational curriculum with children of the farm by implementing as facilitators and developing engaging and creative methodologies based on popular education philosophies.
Reforestation Project
A project I initiated to reforest a land to be used by the community, planting over 1000 native trees and shrubs and herbs of 48 different species. Made possible through a grant from Urgent Action Fund.
We have collaborated with:
L’Esprit Libre alternative School in Hermel
SADA Playback Theatre in Tripoli
Zoukak Theatre company
Buzuruna Juzuruna Farm
Les Racides du Ciel Farm
Jibal NGO
Action for Hope
Catalytic Action
Bulaban Circus
Dwellarium: Blackout in
Beirut
2021
A series of sound pieces capturing and manipulating the sounds of generators that imbued the atmosphere of Beirut, robbed from electricity, amidst a economic collapse.
This work was part of The Listening Rooms: Seats in the Abandoned Theatre curated by the Museum for the Displaced- it can be fully experienced on their platform.
A Sound Sample
Production and Trumpet: Dima Mabsout
Post-Production: Mohammad Golabi
August 4th 2021
I invite you to dwell in a series of soundscapes—field recordings of the atmosphere in Beirut today—one year after the explosion that wiped out half the city and all its livelihood. Amidst the capital collapse of a mafia government that never cared for its people, a hungry people who, having taken to the streets, were silenced by a global pandemic and trapped between dense concrete. The scorching heat of a climate crisis cannot be soothed by the little resources everyone is fighting over. Blackouts every day and the rumbling is ever-present. Without it, there would be complete darkness.
Sound is all encompassing, you cannot look away, but you can grow so accustomed to it that it can cease to exist. This rumbling never stops, here in Beirut. It is the sound of diesel combustion, permeating every corner. It is the machine breathing—loud and consistent, so consistent that you forget about it completely. This has become our new neutral, a new kind of silence.
We are dominated by ears that refuse to listen, by systems that isolate us, detach us from the tools and means that keep us alive, keep us in place, in need, inept, hooked, always. We forget that movement is part of life, that silence can be sweeter than this, that another world order is possible. Lift with me, this rumbling from the unconscious, in a journey of play, with the dissonance of the global way of life as we know it.
HUMBABA’S WOMB: MYTHOLOGIES OF FEAR
Performance and Multimedia Installationat Emancipation of the Living / Emancipação do Vivente Exhibition
Curatied by the Museum for the Displaced
at Galeria Municipal de Almada.
1.
Who protects you? I ask this question to what remains of the green spaces of Lebanon, suffering from political pollution towards people and land. My quest begins with an observation: a wave of people who, like me, amidst the many crises of the recent years, are leaving the city, back to land. When the systems that have held us (or so it seemed) collapse, we are forced to find new ground to stand on. Could this movement back to land open for us the opportunity to regenerate our landscapes, or could this simply become a continuation of the exploitation, an extension of the corrosive, built environments and vanishing ecologies?
They answered:Humbaba the ancient being, protector of the cedar forest, Humbaba the beast feared to death by all, so feared that he was slaughtered, and the whole forest slaughtered, for the gates of the city to rise.
The spirit of wilderness, a force so powerful that we embodied it as a beast and conquered it- in the same way we conquer darkness, the feminine, the indigenous, and otherness. Could the root of separation be our fears? How we relate to land is how we relate to each other, and the futures we co-create depend intrinsically on how we perceive these relationships.
*Photos Courtsey of Patricia Black
2.
The City’s Hidden Excrements
(Video, 2022)
This footage,shot incognito, is of illegal sand extraction on the Lebanese coast polluted with raw sewage, destroying ecosystems and putting the shoreline at risk.
In an endless defiance of people’s right to public space, this sight degraded from one of the most popular beaches in the 70s to another inaccessible site of corruption.
*Installed in collaboration with Rami Chahine
*Photos Courtsey of Patricia Black
Poems
Isolation.
The body calls
lacking nurture
in the vacuum of walls.
The senses hungry
to touch
to breathe beyond
surface sensations
of food without soul,
air without substance,
water that is stale.
Pores dry, forget how to function or heal roots
bound in a pot, un-infinite.
The infinite lineage preceding
buried in concrete drawers, deprived to disintegrate
back into the earth that birthed it.
The rule of energy is such:
that which you put attention to, grows.
The body calls
lacking nurture
in the vacuum of walls.
The senses hungry
to touch
to breathe beyond
surface sensations
of food without soul,
air without substance,
water that is stale.
Pores dry, forget how to function or heal roots
bound in a pot, un-infinite.
The infinite lineage preceding
buried in concrete drawers, deprived to disintegrate
back into the earth that birthed it.
The rule of energy is such:
that which you put attention to, grows.
Confrontation.
It can be easy to romanticize
her scent, changing faces, and deep greens;
It can be easy to blame ourselves, as monsters destroying her soils,
to forget sometimes,
that the slightest shift in her sleep is an earthquake wiping out cities built by our biggest machines.
To reconcile, we approach, she brings forth tests
thorns underneath bare feet,
ticks and snakes on naked skin, thunder and winds that blow away our make-shift shelters.
Alone, against the night in a darkened forest, unknown, howling, can we pace our breath?
Dear fear, I say,
I see you.
I ask you to connect me
To what has separated us from love.
It can be easy to romanticize
her scent, changing faces, and deep greens;
It can be easy to blame ourselves, as monsters destroying her soils,
to forget sometimes,
that the slightest shift in her sleep is an earthquake wiping out cities built by our biggest machines.
To reconcile, we approach, she brings forth tests
thorns underneath bare feet,
ticks and snakes on naked skin, thunder and winds that blow away our make-shift shelters.
Alone, against the night in a darkened forest, unknown, howling, can we pace our breath?
Dear fear, I say,
I see you.
I ask you to connect me
To what has separated us from love.
The Sacrifice.
There are those who believe we are powerless, and that there is no other way--
but to dominate, to set us free from weakness, to conquer, to defeat and not be defeated, to enslave and not be the slaves building towers, of convenience, banquets of feasts, bottomless pits, we must destroy everything else, step on all life that takes space from us, (it gets heated) to choose ourselves over others, to choose our life over others. (it starts boiling) We, conquerors of the earth! And when we defeat earth, we conquer mars–
(The egg falls from my bosom and breaks and there is silence.)
He looks into my eyes as I hide the tears. I am sorry, he says. It’s not you, I say, I lost my egg. He says, I am sorry. In his heart he knows feelings, and for my egg that died, he felt.
There are those who believe we are powerless, and that there is no other way--
but to dominate, to set us free from weakness, to conquer, to defeat and not be defeated, to enslave and not be the slaves building towers, of convenience, banquets of feasts, bottomless pits, we must destroy everything else, step on all life that takes space from us, (it gets heated) to choose ourselves over others, to choose our life over others. (it starts boiling) We, conquerors of the earth! And when we defeat earth, we conquer mars–
(The egg falls from my bosom and breaks and there is silence.)
He looks into my eyes as I hide the tears. I am sorry, he says. It’s not you, I say, I lost my egg. He says, I am sorry. In his heart he knows feelings, and for my egg that died, he felt.
3.
Gallery Opening: Particapatory Performance
A Performance Series & Artist-run Residency by Aghili-Karlsson
Text about the Residency:
“
The project Reorientations is a performance series by the artist duo aghili/karlsson. In dialogue with the queer and postcolonial philosopher Sara Ahmed's ideas about points of orientation, situations and spatial commonalities are created that orient us away from prevailing hierarchical (and violent) interactions. In collaboration with the American urbanist Jess Myers, conditions are formulated for conversation and work around the concept of "regional solidarity" which stands in opposition to the dichotomy urban-rural.
Reorientations has its starting point in the publi c space of the rural areas of Södertälje county and is the initiation of a thematic artist-run residency program. For the first edition, four artists from Sweden, Sápmi, Lebanon and Mexico, who are interested in questions concerning decoloniality, farming and ritual performative practices, were invited to attend a residency at aghili/karlsson's studio and their garden.
Reorientations has its starting point in the publi c space of the rural areas of Södertälje county and is the initiation of a thematic artist-run residency program. For the first edition, four artists from Sweden, Sápmi, Lebanon and Mexico, who are interested in questions concerning decoloniality, farming and ritual performative practices, were invited to attend a residency at aghili/karlsson's studio and their garden.
The healing ritual was brought to a table, created by aghili/karlsson which were placed in (a) public space; nature reserves, fields and forests. At the table a performative conversation took place between the artist-in-residence and invited guests.
Reorientations is a continuation of the duo's work Safar – a performance series that revolves around utopian realities and takes invited guests and participants on a journey from central Stockholm to the duo's studio in the countryside outside Södertälje. Read more about Safar here
Reorientations is supported by Kulturrådet/Swedish Art Council, Konstnärsnämnden/The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Region Stockholm and in collaboration with Södertälje Konsthall.”
Reorientations is a continuation of the duo's work Safar – a performance series that revolves around utopian realities and takes invited guests and participants on a journey from central Stockholm to the duo's studio in the countryside outside Södertälje. Read more about Safar here
Reorientations is supported by Kulturrådet/Swedish Art Council, Konstnärsnämnden/The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Region Stockholm and in collaboration with Södertälje Konsthall.”
At the end of the residency, Dima invited people to join a walk from Södertälje to Hölö crossing the 25km distance from the urban to the rural. Throughout the day, they walked with intention - as a meditation, a pilgrimage, a performative practice - with several pauses to engage with different sites, landscapes and in between spaces as they revisit our relationship to home. The day ended with a dinner at the house, a bonfire and a closing ritual.
The conversation
Dima brought the experience of the walk to the table to open up a conversation about migration, our relationship to land, territory, and the relativity of distance between communities. What role do artistic practices have in reimagining and reshaping our relationships? We will build on Sara Ahmed’s thoughts on ‘re-orientations’, as well as the personal experience and backgrounds of those gathered around the table.
Reorientations / Dima Mabsout from aghili/karlsson on Vimeo.
العربة العارية
2012-2014 - Public Interventions / Social Project
Beirut - London -
center for versatile uses.
