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

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