Culture Resource is pleased to announce the names of the grantees of the exceptional grants’ initiative 2020 which aims to support and encourage artists and writers to continue producing individual and collaborative projects in order to preserve artistic life and creativity during the pandemic and the subsequent period.
The jury committees selected 40 projects out of 626 applications received by Culture Resource.
Cinema
Ismaël, Tunisia/Filmmaker, visual artist
Video “Li(f/v)e”
This experimental video inspects our relationship to reality when it has been invaded by the virtual. Li(f/v)e is a maelstrom of emotions that mixes images, videos, sounds, texts, and poems to excavate reflections on our vision of the world we live in, and understand the tools that allow us to better see and hear in this digital age.
Talal Khoury, Lebanon/Filmmaker, cinematographer
Short film “Fallen Skies”
“Fallen Skies” explores the temporal and visual anticipation of death triggered by barrel bombs. From an artistic standpoint, the film is premised on the importance of the camera in capturing movements of the barrel bomb that are invisible to the human eye. Politically, “Fallen Skies” questions the concept of violence as a spectacle and the influence of the aesthetics of this spectacle on the viewer.
Nicolas Khoury, Lebanon/Filmmaker
Short documentary “Fiasco”
“Fiasco” penetrates the intimacy of Nicolas’ family and personal life. It monitors the strong yet shattered relationship between him and his mother and sister, following the death of his father. Combining footage from the films Nicolas made in his adolescence and excerpts from his photographic diaries, the documentary focuses primarily on his relationship with his mother who tries to accept and understand his homosexuality but simultaneously pushes him to marry a woman for fear he will end up lonely and alone. In scenes that are filled with spontaneity and humor, the documentary revisits ingrained attitudes in Lebanese and Arab societies on sexual orientation, marriage and solitude.
Sofia El Khyari, Morocco/Writer and animation director
Animated short film “The shadow of the butterflies”
Haunted by the memory of a bygone love, a woman resorts to contemplating the butterflies that inhabit a mysterious forest. She is overcome by complex nostalgic feelings that are both beautiful and bitter as daydreams blend with reality, fancy with depression, and pleasure with pain. It eventually becomes clear that these moments, which the woman thought of as an escape, were the most powerful way to confront reality in preparation for a rebirth.
Rachelle Aoun, Lebanon/Filmmaker, cinematographer
Short fiction “The bystander”
On a sunny day in Beirut, basketball coach Roger sets off to work, proudly carrying a box of chocolates to celebrate the birth of his child with colleagues. On the way, he watches a gruesome violent assault against a defenceless person but does not intervene. The news of the incident quickly spread through all the news channels so that the coach’s colleagues and students talk about little else while congratulating him on his newborn.
Ismaeel Hamdy, Egypt/Director
Short fiction “Rabbit hole”
A short fiction film that takes place on the day that Faris (16) is released from prison after serving a nine-month sentence for slashing the face of another kid who had insulted his mother. Faris decides that he and his mother should move out of el-Zawiya el-Hamra, a poor and rough popular quarter in Cairo, and begin a new life in a better part of the town. However, he finds himself forced to resort to theft and violence one last time in order to attain this hope.
Drifa Mzenner, Algeria/Graphic designer and filmmaker
Short documentary “Dar Hirak”
This documentary attempts to relate the story of the Algerians’ second revolution as a completion of the first. Towards this end, it links the struggle of Hassiba Ben Bouali, the famous female Algerian freedom fighter who, at the age of 17, broke the taboos of her times and conservative environment in order to join the Algerian National Liberation Army, with the story of the Hirak Movement in which men and women of all ages joined ranks with a single aim: the quest for freedom.
Madonna Adib, Syria/Writer and director
Short documentary “Between here and there”
This documentary attempts to answer the following question: What is the cost of physical freedom in a male dominated society that gives men the right to possess women’s bodies? To probe the consequences women bear when they break their preassigned fates and roles, the director spends time in Tripoli, Lebanon, with four young women from Hama, Syria, to discuss with them the consequences of leaving their families and removing the veil. The film follows their journey and the filmmaker’s one in removing her veil and leaving her Damascene society, socially and religiously.
Elsadig Mohamed Ahmed Abdelgayoum, Sudan/Photographer and documentary director
Abuzar Adam, Sudan/Photographer and director
Feature Documentary “The Camera Never Cries”
In the covid-19 era, two filmmakers get together after having risked their lives to document the December 2019 Revolution. They find themselves faced with a huge stock of photographic material and memories related to the revolution in their country. With the help of their visual footage, they try to reexamine their political attitudes in order to alleviate their sense of guilt and despair and to silence the voices that continue to haunt them. In the process, they ask themselves over and over about their relationship to their footage and how dissociated the scenes were from themselves.
Jurors:
Ayten Amin, Egypt/Filmmaker
Hania Mroue, Lebanon/ Director of Metropolis Cinema
Mohamed Lansari, Morocco/ Director of Cinémathèque de Tanger and arts curator
Visual arts
Bassem Yousri, Egypt/Visual artist and filmmaker
The exhibition “Guideposts”
The exhibition of large multimedia signposts that convey messages to the public in the form of instructions or commands that conflict with the confusing outward form of the artworks. The aim is to make the viewer ponder the nature of the relationship between the authoritative entity and its visual manifestations and their impacts on the viewer. The statues are inspired by the artist’s documentary study of the visual clutter that abounds in government institutions in Egypt and the extensions of this phenomenon as manifested in daily life.
Mouhcine Rahaoui, Morocco/Visual artist
“Dark world” performance and installation
Multimedia installations that profile the hardships of mineworkers in Jerada, a mining region notorious for numerous worksite deaths. The project balances the themes of the hardships of the inhabitants of that city and of the working class in general with intimate issues in the artist’s personal life and events that he can never forget such as the image of his father’s blackened face and clothes when he returned home from the mines at night.
Lara Tabet, Lebanon/Doctor, visual artist and photographer
“The return of the old man to his vigor” project
“The return of the old man to his vigor” is an old ottoman book written in 903 (AD) by Ahmed Ben Suleimen Ben Kamal Pacha at the demand of Sultan Selim The First in order to reinvigorate the latter’s dwindling sexuality. The artist reconfigurates this book by executing the different recipes and creating visual interpretations through their reactions with photosensitive photographic paper, a method called chemigram, drawing a parallel between the figures of the healer and the photographer.
Abdelaziz Zerrou, Morocco/Visual artist
“Water Shape : Tarenja” installation
The project combines a sculpture installation with musical performance in a process of contemplating water as a poetic and cultural phenomenon that inspires people’s imagination and creativity and as an ecological and existential issue. It is also an artistic attempt to write the history of thirst by deconstructing the aesthetics of the desert space and the politics of living there as the sounds of drums, reed flutes and parched throats echo from behind the tents and the dunes. The idea of this project was inspired by the droughts experienced by the inhabitants of the Oued Draa region in Morocco. The title is borrowed from an Amazigh term associated with pagan water fetching rituals
Yasmine ElMeleegy, Egypt/Visual artist; Mariam Ibrahim Boctor, Egypt/Writer and artistic curator; Sara Hamdy, Egypt/Visual artist; Doaa Ali, Egypt/Visual artist
Exhibition “Is this a museum or is it not?” (working title)
The project involves a museological exploration/restoration of the Stephenson Pharmacy (founded in 1899) and its artefacts. It includes a short film on the history of the pharmacy, audiovisual equipment attached to herbs and plants to amplify their sounds, a collection of old advertisements and restored and renovated three dimensional items based on ancient descriptions of medicines and therapeutic instruments. The work examines the changes pharmaceutical profession, the healthcare system and medicinal policies underwent as a result of globalization, mechanization and monopolistic practices.
Jihen Ben Chikha, Tunisia/Visual artist; Ahmed Halioui, Tunisia/Data scientist; Mohamed Wael Gharbi, Tunisia/Web developer
“Open data graphs” exhibition
“Open data graphs” is a collaborative project that combines the visual arts, technology and science in an exploration of the relationship between the environment and data systems and that aims to rethink the tools used to manage the ecosystem and their consequences. Various interactive machines and media will be used to present some of the environmental data collected on plants and display it in diverse artistic forms. In this manner, the project will custom design the infographics of any experience between live beings and their physical environment.
Maji Lakhdar, Tunisia/Filmmaker and visual artist
“The bronze forest” exhibition
A photographic exhibition that presents a legend of catastrophe and rebirth in around fifty pictures. The work will be a testimony to a time filled with disappointment and terror, when an entire people lost their core cohesion and society’s shortcomings and excesses were exposed.
Jurors:
Sulafa Hijazi, Syria/ Visual artist
Tarek Abou El Fetouh, Egypt/ Independent arts curator and architect
Hassan Darsi, Morocco/ Visual artist
Music
Bouhrizi Badiaa, Tunisia/Composer, singer and song-writer
“Love/revolt” Album
This ethereal musical work explores the inherent relationship between love and revolution, thoughts and affect without focusing on profiling the aesthetics of Arab music or that of any other musical identity. The purpose is to express the essence of an Arab individual through an objective humanitarian approach.
Liliane Chlela, Lebanon/Music producer
The album “Safala”
In this album, Chlela attempts to interpret the current situation in Lebanon by giving a new direction to the electronic music that has become associated with her musical identity. The tracks in this album are a continuation of the musical approach she adopted for her solo EP album “Malign/Benign” which was released in May 2020.
AbedAlhadi Hashim, Palestine/Rapper and music producer; Mohammad Jamil Al-Haj Aref, Palestine/ Rapper, writer and musician
Sound works “Crossing to the Corridor 2020-2084”
This collaborative work, inspired by Orwell’s “1984”, consists of six tracks based on dynamic sounds using analog equipment. The album will include a booklet containing the lyrics in the recordings. The producers will try to portray the types of governments and societies that they imagine will exist in 2084 through a psychological diagnosis of the types of freedoms and consciousness that are produced today and exhibited in the practices of the individual, the group and authority in the 21st century, and an analysis of how these practices and sensitivities to them evolve and impact on reality.
Faris Ishaq, Jordan/Musician, composer and music therapist
“Nay: Nature Addresses You” Album
This 45 minute long audio and video recorded album of a solo nay (reed flute) performance showcases how Ishaq developed his technique so as to transform the nay into an instrument that can execute melodic, percussion and harmonic functions at once, thereby enabling it to perform world music and jazz, like the flute. As the nay is the preferred instrument in Sufic spiritual contemplation, the composer will create pieces intended to trigger positive and negative subliminal responses that will invite the listener to engage in a journey of self-discovery and self-reconciliation.
Chokri Daii, Tunisia/Musician; Mohamed Ben Salha, Tunisia/Musician; Anis Bahmed, Tunisia/Musician; Amin Haddeoui, Tunisia/Musician
“Serha” Album
The “Sarha” musical project seeks to revive the oral music memory of the southern Tunisian oasis town of Nefta which has a musical tradition that combines elements of jazz, rock, electronic music, Tunisian folk and Afro music. The work will relate the stories of saints, slaves and revolutionaries.
Ghada Harb, Syria/Musician, singer and Gardenia choir conductor; Anna Akkash, Syria/Theater director and playwright; Safana Bakleh, Syria/Music composer
“Night one thousand” musical
A musical based on a juster and more humane portrayal of the female characters in “A Thousand and One Nights” including Scheherazade. The dramatic arcs of the female characters will vary from the original stories as their motives, choices and fates will be different from those of the original characters. Members of the Gardenia Choir, a female choir, will be trained to sing and perform the female roles while male guests will be invited to perform the roles of the male characters that shape the contexts of the new stories.
Sandy Chamoun, Lebanon / singer and actress
The album” The trilogy of Fata 17Oct”
A three-track album, Fata 17 October Trilogy will express the sensations the artist felt during the Lebanese 17 October uprising: euphoria, fear and inertia. The compositions fuse digital electronic sounds, audio excerpts from video footage shot in the streets during the Lebanese uprising and uprisings that took place elsewhere at the same time (i.e. the sound of fires in Lebanon and the sound of the saxophone playing during the confrontations in Chile), the singer’s voice, the bouzouki and percussion instruments.
Mahmoud El Khateeb, Egypt/Singer, composer and theater artist
Live transmission of Hawas’ new “superhero” album
Broadcasting a live concert on the occasion of the release of Hawas’album “Superhero”, through the techniques of live broadcast, recording and live editing, and the production of fully filmed and recorded songs in Studio Hawas, and the production of live or recorded visual content. Hawas’ alternative music is characterized by progressive style and the drama of melody and lyrics.
Jurors:
Nahla Mattar, Egypt/Researcher and music composer
Fadi El Abdallah, Lebanon/ Researcher and music critic
Imed Alibi, Tunisia/ Musician
Performing arts
Youness Atbane, Morocco/Performing artist
“Immortal objects for a dead artist” (working title) performance
In a modern art museum, an artist falls into a coma after seeing a masterpiece on display vandalized. We follow his comatose dreams in which he variously turns into an artefact, an artistic offering or an artistic masterpiece. He thus becomes an instrument for deconstructing, criticising and questioning the role of the museum. The portrayal of the “artist objectified” attempts to analyze the geographical, political and symbolic dimensions of the museum, the artist’s relationship to the in the context of cultural dependency and the question of representation in the Middle East and North Africa.
Petra Serhal, Lebanon/Dancer and choreographer
“If you wish to see me dancing, you ought to visit the passing cloud” interactive dance installation
A performance taking place in a post-apocalyptic city soaked in darkness, where remaining artificial eyes stalk, film and expose a wandering woman in the virtual realm. Instagram, as the performance’s platform, is operated as a documentation and navigation space, where the audience follows the gaze of an ‘other’ into the city, the woman, the movement and the space in between. This project is the second of a series looking at “documentation” versus “live” in performance and the experience and affect that each produces for its audience. The first part of this series which was an online lecture performance was presented during the Redzone Festival 20/21.
Osama Ghanam, Syria/Director and professor in theater studies
“The Maids” play
The project is to present an adaptation of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” (1947) in Syrian dialect and in a contemporary Damascene context. Genet’s play eloquently depicts the crime of class structure and the contours of the map of poverty. The adaptation will be a stylistic, dramaturgic and performative experiment rich with possibilities for laying bare the individualism in the social media culture we consume from every type of screen and mirror that dictates to us what is beautiful or ugly and what is or is not sinful, and that reduces us to a pathological obsession with the ubiquitous image of the other even in that other’s absence.
Chrystèle Khodr, Lebanon/Actress, writer and director
“Who killed Youssef Beidas?” interactive performance
“Who killed Youssef Beidas” is an interactive site-specific performance that reconstructs the political environment that led “Intra Bank” to declare bankruptcy in 1966 under circumstances that remain controversial to the present day. Through the rumors that surrounded that surrounded that bankruptcy, the performance probes the economic collapse in Lebanon today.
Ali Chahrour, Lebanon/Director, dancer and choreographer; Two or the Dragon (Ali Al Hout and Abed Kobeissy), Lebanon/Musicians and music composers
“The Sea” dance performance
Two young men appear on stage and as they dance they search for new forms to express their love under political, social and religious circumstances inimical to this. The movements are performed to music, texts and poems that have been banned or heavily censored because of the ways in which they treat questions related to gender, sex, the body and love. This collaborative performance is part of a new trilogy on rites of death, mourning and paying condolences in the Arab world with a focus on how the body participates in these rites. It examines the concept of intimacy in love in contemporary society and issues related to the body, its physical presence, the problems it presents, and its relationship to collective memory and the heritage of contemporary society.
Abdallah Daif, Egypt/Writer and performing artist
“7 sisters” radio drama
In a surreal fantasy mode of a radio drama, a group of artists try to organize a collective illegal migration and commandeer a freighter in an Egyptian port and set off toward Europe. As a form of camouflage to ensure the operation’s success, they film it, casting it as an elaborate anti-establishment crime in order to win sympathy among a public that is increasingly discontent with the government and, simultaneously, to mislead the police. The work is inspired by how Egyptian audiences of the TV series La Casa de Papel (The Money Heist) identified with the criminal gang as a vicarious act of defiance against the authorities thereby gaining a false sense of victory.
Remi Sarmini, Syria/Actor and Essia Jaïbi, Tunisia/Playwright, Theatre director and producer
“Remi”, theater play
“Rémi” is a loose dramatic adaptation of the novel Sans Famille by Hector Malot to the “here and now” in Syria. The adaptation relates the story of the actor Rémi who has been forced to flee his country and to roam from one country to the next without any proper papers to prove both his nationality and his gender. His search for stability and love leads him to the stage where he relates the events of his painful life, likening his journey to that of the homeless boy in Sans Famille.
Farah Saleh, Palestine/Dancer and choreographer
“Past-inous” dance video
A dance installation video that treats the bodies of the performers as living archives. It aims to exhibit the daily gestures of refugeedom and to examine the relationship between the performers and the gestures of family members who had been displaced in the past in the framework of a contemplation of the future of the refugee question. Work on this project will be conducted on a digital platform with ten Palestinian dancers who represent the second generation of refugees. Some of these live in Palestine and others in the Palestinian diaspora.
Alaa Minawi, Palestine/Performer, light designer, scenographer
“2048: Identity in Dissolution” performative installation
Alaa does not want to be present in the same room with others in a tangible way. So he constructed a parallel world for himself in which he chooses those who can be in the same place as he is if they pass a test. This involves performing certain rituals, such as speaking about their personal experiences at the moments they most wished they could disappear. This collaborative work, which consists of a performance followed by a lecture delivered by the Turkish researcher Nilgün Bayraktar, examines Arab post apocalyptic futurism. The concept of the performance (presence/absence) is inspired by the lives of refugees and domestic workers in Lebanon where invisibility from the “eyes of the regime” is not just a way of life but a key to safety.
Jurors:
Jumana Al-Yasiri, Syria/Arts curator and researcher
Ahmed El Attar, Egypt/Theater director and playwright
Ghazi Zaghbani, Tunisia/Theater director
Literature
Maya Abu-AlHayyat, Palestine/Poet, writer, translator and actress; Mohammad Joulani, Palestine/Visual artist and painter
The visual and lyrical book “Fear”
The work treats the concept of fear in its colonialist, consumerist and artistic facets in Palestine through poetic texts and visual illustrations and other artistic images. The writer will work together with the artist on ways to embody the concept of fear while studying its history in human affairs.
Wael Kadour, Syria/Playwright and theater director
Theatrical text “The Lady from the Sea”
The project is a documentary and dramatic theatrical text that simulates the historical event in which female political detainees presented Henry Ibsen’s “The Lady from the Sea” in Douma Women’s Prison prison in 1991. It was a bold act of defiance against the prison authorities. The project also explores the transformational effects of this incident by tracking the lives of some of its participants, from the hardships and restrictions on liberties they endured after their release to their lives in exile after the Syrian revolution and civil war compelled them to seek refuge in the Gulf or in Europe.
Wagdy ElKomy, Egypt/Novelist and journalist
Novel “Painting 130” (working title)
A novel based on the life of the Egyptian artist, Mahmoud Said, it relates how three of his paintings made their way out of Egypt via his friends and ended up in the possession of an unidentified individual who subsequently raked in a fortune by auctioning them off at Christie’s in London. The three works were sold in one of Christie’s “Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art” sales in October 2019. Each of the works was valued at between 10,000 and 15,000 Sterling.
Nawaf Radwan, Palestine/Writer and filmmaker; Tamara Nassar, Jordan/Researcher and translator
Anthology “Everybody dances to techno but me”
The work is a collection of sarcastic narratives whose events unfold in a world of quarantines and curfews after governments and regimes took advantage of emergency epidemic containment laws to initiate a new chapter in the control over people’s lives. In this particular chapter, technology rebels, leading humankind from the control of “Big Brother” to the control of “Big Data.”
Zeinab Zaher, Lebanon/Poet, writer; Wajdi Abu Diab, Lebanon/Music composer
The project “Open your arms to drown”
This collaborative work both writes about death and puts it to music. It is an anthology of poetic texts in an encounter with music. The encounter is unsystematic and unconventional in order to create a contemporary artistic work that speaks of the authors’ (the poet’s and the musician’s) existential pain and anxiety, the panic in the face of death and meaninglessness, and the fear of both love and solitude.
Bouthaina Ghribi, Tunisia/Journalist and TV producer
Novel “Salihah… A biography that has been hidden”
This novel is based on the life of the Tunisian singer Saliha and proposes a number of hypotheses about her premature death and treats how the Tunisian government exploited her posthumously despite the fact that she had been the object of harassment and threats on numerous occasions without having received any protection. The work also delves into the world of Tunisian music during the colonial era, thereby becoming a vehicle to deconstruct issues that remain crucial today such as misogyny, women in the public sphere, the difficulties facing artistic creativity due to the control of diverse authorities, and the convergence of art with politics and money.
Sari Moussa, Syria/Writer
“Consolation of failures” short stories
The protagonists in this collection of short stories find consolation from their disappointments in the world and its concerns and problems by withdrawing into reading and writing. As a consequence of their immersion into a parallel universe, the borders between their parallel universes and reality blur. magic and beauty.
Jurors:
Assia Mousei, Algeria/Publisher
Fatma Al Hagi, Libya/Literary critic
Hassan Daoud, Lebanon/Writer
*Photo: The Unfinished Works of Kevork Kassarian (Lebanon, 2018), a theater play by Hashem Adnan, supported by the Production Awards program
