 My name is Amanda Abikhail. I'm an independent curator and the founder of temporary art platform non-for-profit dedicated to social art practices based in Beirut. For those who might recognize this building on my t-shirt it's called the egg and it's saying in Arabic the egg hatched a revolution. I would like to thank Simon and the Soros Art Fellows program for bringing me here. Although I have to say that I'm very emotional and feeling a bit guilty not to be on the streets with my friends. A protester was killed yesterday. It started like a very peaceful revolution, but it seems that things are changing every day. I had prepared a very different intervention for today. I actually almost canceled the flight, but as you said, there's a lot of sadness. I wanted to bring hope to this room, to the assembly. I've been, for the last 25 days in the streets, taking part of an exceptional popular uprising, a revolution against outrageous corruption, a moment of collapse of uncontrolled capitalism. I'm sorry if the images scrolling in the background don't correspond to what I'm saying. I excused the lack of synchronicity, but this is a totally improvised intervention. There's a desire, a sense of urgency to react to what is happening, but at the same time in need of space, of time, of distance to really examine how our practices in the social art field will be affected and shaped after the uprising. It has just begun and it already changed the country and the way we engage with spaces, with public squares, with public art, with commoning practices, participation, which have been my areas of focus for the last years. The last project I curated was with an artist who is present here, Annabelle Dow. I actually invited her to do a participatory project taking the voices of people from Beirut and give them to archaeological artifacts that were at the National Museum and it's really incredible that was like a year ago people looked at very like ancient keys, 5,000 years old keys saying okay, so what is that key? We want to open the parliament to kick out all the politicians we want electricity. So it's really interesting to see the voices of the people being real on the square while we as curators have been trying to mediate and create platforms for for for public opinion. In Beirut today, citizens are demanding the collapse of every corrupt and authoritarian form of power, including the collapse of contemporary art. That's very funny. It was mentioned in one of the graffitis that I read on the walls of Beirut downtown Esqat el-Fan el-Muasir We demand the collapse of contemporary art. The sentence was shared and reposted by few artists and activists and it partly led to arts and cultural institutions meeting to discuss ways to support the revolution on the ground. So we published a statement of strike that was two weeks ago and part of it said arts and culture are an integral part of every society and the expanded space of creative and critical thought is imperative in times of upheaval. The strike is therefore not a withdrawal of the arts and culture from this moment, but rather a suspension of business as usual. While on strike, we are connecting with colleagues across sectors and groups to formulate together what we can contribute to the movement. We are part of a national, regional and global desire to dream, think, fight for, enact and embody radical imaginations leading to structural and systematic change. See you on the streets. I'm shaken by what is going on, thrilled that there is no place for disenchantment anymore, but also scared of tomorrow, of the repression yet to come and the economic disaster awaiting us. Banks have been closed for the last 20 days and it seems that wheat will be like we won't have access to wheat and bread in the next 10 days. It had been a year that funding for my platform, for TAP, the non-for-profit curatorial was frozen and our activities have been reduced to research and fundraising, working, planning and then cancelling projects. So that was the situation for the last year. The popular uprising Lebanon woke up to on the 17th of October is an accumulation of more than 30 years of corruption. Just to give you a picture for those who don't really know what I'm talking about, the city has its shore totally privatized and public spaces access to the sea is impossible. Women in my country can be killed by their husband and without being punished by law. Migrant labor is regulated by a slavery-like law and garbage is piling up in temporary landfills around the city and in the sea since the garbage crisis began in 2015. This is not to mention the most basic needs like electricity, public health, education that are not provided since more than 30 years. In this context temporary art platform was trying to intervene with ways of doing and curating in the hope to operate on the scale of reality. I call it a scale of one-on-one. As to have a real impact that is not only at the level of knowledge production and discourse, but through action in the doing. I fought like many others to make projects happen with very little support. Audiences which needed to be created. Trying to give another definition to what art meant outside galleries, exhibition spaces and the art market circuit that has been flourishing in Lebanon since the end of the war. The necessary issues to be tackled were too many, but we tried not to lose hope, not to give up and have faith that these small endeavors we initiated with TAP were very small stepping stones that would ricochet, meaning bounce again and again on the surface of the water. The focus with TAP was always to identify the commons or create them, to build a sense of community in a disenchanted and dark time. We forged new ways of engaging with artists and communities by innovating formats of commissioning and curatorial methodologies. You saw maybe some pictures of newspapers that was a project I curated three, four years ago convincing daily newspapers who are affiliated to different political parties in Lebanon to give spaces within the space of the newspaper to 12 contemporary artists. We were looking for public spaces to create alliances, to talk to the people, to address pressing issues in poetic or conceptual ways, to contribute to the forming of public opinions, forms of togetherness and commenting our ways of engaging or responding to the anthropocene and we tried to address it with very radical gestures, with concrete actions rather than themes. For example, the last two artist residencies we've organized were focused on environmental issues. One of them was located in an industrial site that was endangering a forest in the north of Lebanon and through the residency we actually managed to convince the stakeholders and the municipality to dismantle part of that industrial site. Another example was another residency in the south of Lebanon that was last year, the theme was water. The south of Lebanon is very controversial because Israel was occupying the south because of water. The theme went a bit all over the place but one artist worked on the Bissri Dam which is a very controversial dam which will cover a valley, like almost maybe 12 villages. It's an environmental absurdity and it's really interesting because last week there were three protests, one of them on Delier which is a site that we've worked on, like the last access to the sea in Beirut, like a plot of land that we tried to reclaim through interventions by artists and that industrial site in the north and that dam so it's really extraordinary to see that these projects are actually being the subject of the protest and part of the revolution. The first conclusion that the upheaval has reiterated is the power of collective action and participation. Concrete and radical ways of doing seem to me the only effective way to be dealing with topics such as the anthropocene and migration for instance. Some artists and curators are interested in that and are doing it. Without falling in the pitfalls of popularism and social work art and curatorial practice can be effective and small scale is okay. Revolutions are not surprises. I can confirm that they operate on a non-announced agenda but they are the result of previous small scale seizures of power. I would like to think that the Lebanese revolution was made by hungry citizens but also by intellectuals, by artists and institution who have operated small maneuvers through their work since the last 30 years which they did with little means and constant struggle and doubt combining activism, education and art. We are where the change begins, maybe not where it ends up. It's in these invisible spaces that radical power operates. These artistic endeavors travel like viruses. They mushroom in the darkest spaces. If you allow me a last quote, this is Rebecca Solnit to give you a metaphor of the mushroom once again. I know that Mariana gave one. After a rain, mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from sometimes vast underground fungus that remained invisible and largely unknown. Apprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork or underground work often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists and I would like to add here by artists and curators engaged in the field of social art practices. Thank you.