Leah Whitman-Salkin’s practice as an editor is focused on the collaborative aspects of editing, with her work exploring translation, the space of the visual and the written, and the process of making public through publishing. She is the founder, with Simon Battisti, of 28 November, an experiment in making community space, alternative distribution, and publishing practices through a bookshop and reading room in Tirana, Albania. In 2016 she was the curator, with Simon Battisti and Åbäke, of the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale—an editorial project on translation, music, and emotive spaces. She is deputy editor of Harvard Design Magazine, and former editor at Sternberg Press. Her talk will reflect on the economy and ecology of real and imaginary spaces, and the translation, both in thought and language, of desire, place, and making public.

Paola Yacoub is an artist based in Berlin and the founding director of ARP—Artistic Research Practices at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in Beirut. In promoting the relevancy of the arts, the program ARP proposes an active platform of inquiry of contemporary practices offering the necessary conditions for pushing forward artistic action and new pedagogical perspectives, exchanges among artists, writers, architects, critics and researchers from various fields (arts, sciences, philosophy, politics), as well as the diversity in the performance realm. It is engaged with ethical, social and political questions surrounding artistic and editorial practice.

Artistic works from the 2000s in Lebanon were generally part of the post-conceptual movement. One of the main inquiry conducted at ARP defined it as a field of application of a norm: the permission to remain indifferent to the agents’ intentions. We postulated its dissolution. Editorial practices have a strategic function from this point of view as they engage intentionalist or anti- intentionalist positions. Examples will be presented.

Paola Yacoub graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, and worked at the Institut Français d’archéologie du Proche-Orient in charge of the excavation in downtown Beirut from 1995 to 1999. She collaborated with Michel Lasserre on notations of aspect variations of territories in conflict and post-conflict situations. Her monographic exhibitions include among others Paola Yacoub, Drawing with the things themselves (Beirut Art Center, 2011), and Paola Yacoub, kiss the black stones (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2012).

How does the troubled history of civil war continue to impact the conditions of living in postwar Lebanon? In The Ruin to Come, a collection of essays, written in Beirut between 2006 and 2016, Walid Sadek looks at the conditions of living under a temporality theorized as the “protracted now” of a civil war—one structurally capable of perpetuating the conditions of its own dominance—and argues, that although this temporality seems dominant, it nevertheless remains untranquil in the many unfinished strains of a troubled history that resist falling back into a settled and distant past. The book proposes and investigates diverse concepts of labor: the labor of ruin, the labor of the corpse, the labor of near blindness and the labor of missing.

The presentation of The Ruin to Come, Essays from a Protracted War (Motto Books & Taipei Biennial 2016) and reading by the author will be followed by a conversation with Nida Ghouse. Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. He is Professor and currently Chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut. His early work investigates the familial legacies of the Lebanese civil war. He later began to posit, mostly in theoretical texts, ways of understanding the complexity of lingering civil strife in times of relative social and economic stability. His later written work proposes a theory for a post-war society disinclined to resume normative living. More recently, his artworks and written texts seek a poetics for a sociality governed by the logic of protracted war and search for eruptive temporalities to challenge that same protractedness.

Nida Ghouse is a writer and curator. Her ongoing writing project «Lotus Notes» has appeared variously in Mada Masr (Cairo 2014), After Year Zero (University of Chicago Press 2015), ARTMargins (MIT Press 2016), and Critical Writing Ensembles (Mousse Publishing 2016). She recently co-curated Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017), and is currently working towards The Matrix of All Possible Narratives (with Anselm Franke and Erhard Schüttpelz, slated 2020), both at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She was previously director of Mumbai Art Room, where she installed Walid Sadek’s Thoughts on Speaking Dead.

        20:00 Pages, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi in Conversation with Corinne Diserens, via Skype

Artistic gestures and practices of thought—writing, drawing, and publishing is organized in collaboration with curator Corinne Diserens and Motto Books.

With the support of

Motto, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, National Culture and Arts Foundation & Taipeh Vertretung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland