LOOKING FOR PRESENT MOTION 2017

How can we create the right circumstances for creativity to happen, yet limit our level of intervention in the process so as to allow for it to grow organically?

The paintings

I seek to co-create with nature, it being that creative factor of growth and erosion that’s evolving in time, yielding the complexity of forms we witness around us. Flowing like water it sculpts matter yet gets directed by it, generating life through the interplay of such dualities.
The following pieces were created between 2015 and 2017 using a process printing technique.

It informed the social practice methodology
I later on developed.

The exhibition

The exhibition invited exploration and set the audience up to feel synchronicities between an asynchronous video, a soundscape and the exhibited paintings.
What are the walls of this valley, the stream of the river and the trees that remain communicating at this instant? As the the bulldozers come closer, destroying all that is there to make way for the dam of Jannit Qartaba (Qartaba’s heaven), can we open up our bodies to receive that vibration? Can we express the message? Can we speak the plea? Such was the guiding intention of Ahlam Dirani and Fernando Wanderley’s Butoh Dance fimed on location in front of the dam’s destruction.

It was projected in silence, staged with a microphone in front of it. Any signal it received from the audience would trigger a soundscape to start playing in the room, the more one spoke to it the more sounds it added. Basically, it amplified and randomized our impulse within the system proposed to it.

Visitors, armed with magnifying glasses, were invited to explore and immerse themselves in the intricate details of these captivating works. The exhibition was co-designed in collaboration with Retrieving Beirut (watch video )

COVELITE

DRAKOTANZANITE

CASTANAI

CRINDOJURITE

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RAMI CHAHINE

Art / Pedagogy / Social practice

Is the role of social practice to fill the gap left by the institutions? Or to use it to propose alternative utopias?