 They took back this space and wanted to participate in this political system. Now, of course, this is not our topic here. But one of the consequences of that revolution was that it was a dream, although this dream was transformed into an nightmare. But this doesn't mean that we need to stop. We need to repeat it once, two times, or maybe three or maybe ten times until we can realize our dreams and have a space for citizenship, for rights, for diversity, and for differences. Our discussion today, in a way or another, is one of the consequences and impacts of what happened back then. Maybe what we want is to have a theater, to have a space. And we need also space for our body, we need dancing, etc. But the main question remains, where is the place for the individual, for the Arab individual, where is the place for the individual in general, but specifically for us, where is this public space? How can we reclaim a part of this public space? And who is taking this public space of us, whether it's urban, whether it's the citizenship space? And how can we bring it back? How can we appropriate it again, maybe through the struggle or through the struggle for citizenship? So allow me to present to you our speakers. We have Ameer Saksouk. She is an architect and an urbanist. What's nice about her experience, from my perspective, is that she used her experience as an architect inside the theater, inside the performance and the city. And through a dictophone group, they had really important experiences. I don't know if she will speak about them in detail, but we have something related to the end, about how to defend the Roushey and the shore of Beirut. And I think that Muna Al-Halla, her colleague, will also speak about that from her point of view. And this is actually a sample about what you're speaking about, about the public space. So this is one of the lungs of our city. So this is something that will be seized later on, because this was a place for a public space for our citizens. Maya Al-Hallou is a feminist researcher and writer. She worked a lot on gender. I think that your presence with us will enrich our dialogue, especially about the body of women, about women as a right, about women and the right within the group. I would like to bring your attention to your thesis about the different movements in Lebanon for feminists. And I think it's very important. And you're also in the feminist observatory and media in Lebanon, because we see it as very patriarchal, meaning the media. Thank you very much. But maybe this is another topic for us journalists. From Egypt, from Alexandria, we have with us Mouhab Sadriar in the heart of this topic. You come from Al-Madin, Fou'adayya, and Rahmiya for performance arts. And this is one of the independent groups. When I used to know more about Egypt, back then there was one group. And I would like to create, hasn't created, they had back then Al-Warshah theater, or the workshop theater. And I would like to greet you and greet Alexandria today. You work on reclaiming the public spaces in your way. And we will be able to speak about this today, Mouna Al-Hallab. I spoke a little bit about your experience. Mouna has done a lot of things and she's still continuing. For us, you are linked to Barakat building in 2002. This is how I was introduced to you. I went to do an interview with you. People said you were crazy back then. And no one believed that a Barakat building would become a building for collective memory. That was your bad back then, and you won. And you're also now the campaign to save the leadership. And you, Adot-e-Azam Salam, who has written Ammar Beirut, Reconstatum Beirut, The Last Opportunity. And he was the first one to defend public spaces. And he was able to see through the Hariri vision and say about how it is eating our public space. There are many things, of course. Now, of course, everyone knows that I like Morocco a lot. But you participated in many things in Beirut. Tofi, easy to do, is to my right. They had the first group for modern dancing in Marrakesh in Morocco. And he's now the director of the International Festival. For modern dance, his band is called Ananya and for those in Lebanon who like modern dancing, of course, have seen them in that festival. If we look at the body, whether it's collective or personal, it's considered as a part of the public space. It's something difficult where traditions are prevalent and when we speak folklore, we speak also what is classical. But really what you're doing is a revolution by itself. And at the end will be with Raquel Furtwong. I hope that I sped it right. What's important here with Raquel, of course, she's important in many aspects, but I would like to focus on two things. First of all, that she's coming from the other side of the earth and she will help us to see ourselves through their experience on that side of the Mediterranean. And Raquel is a producer and she focuses on artists that take spaces that are not traditional, that are not conventional and she has worked with people who are very important in theater. And she focuses on finding the alternative space, the non-traditional space. And this is what gives the spectators their space so that they can participate in the show, they can criticize and they can voice their opinion. I hope that I was accurate in my presentation, Raquel. So I won't be long anymore. I would like to start straight on with Munar Halak who will show us some of the elements that she used to defend the memory, the heritage, and the public space. Good evening. Thank you for inviting me here. I will start with an experience that we're working on now. This is Beirut. This is Rausha Rock and you can see the idea. I will tell you about something that happened in 1999. It's about the relationship of people with the space, with the city. There's a Palestinian artist, Nasser Soumy, who participated in Ashkal Alwan and a show on the Kurnish of Beirut. And in two days, we told people that there is a French company that is trying to cut Rausha Rock and to put it on a floating body so that we can take this rock to other countries, to London, the Thames, to the Sun in Paris, and to other water bodies. And back then, they were still working on the reconstruction of Beirut where they destroyed 90% of the downtown and people were seeing this happening and a lot of people were speaking about the debts that we had and we told them that this deal will help us pay our debts and then 10 years after that, we will bring back the rock. Believe it or not, I stayed there for two days doing interviews with people. I didn't tell them anything. They came there. They saw that there were people trying to cut the rock and they asked me what was happening. So I told them this scenario. So they started inventing other scenarios. They said, this is Hariri inventing this because he wanted to remove the rock and build something else instead of it. Why doesn't he build something on the rock? Or why don't he put something on the pavement but something on the pavement then link it with a bridge to the rock? So we had different kinds of scenarios and this is something documented in a video and only few people refused this. Even the Polaroid photographer said this is the last picture of the rock. People actually accepted that this rock would be cut to bring us money. On this basis, in 2014, the delie of the Rauche meaning that this is the last part that wasn't yet urbanized. So we saw that a fence was put around it and until now it's subjected to be occupied and used for an urban development. Hariri bought this land in 1995. Although this is a big space for citizens because it has important geological characteristics archaeological characteristics because this is one of the most important places on the geological level. It's also considered as being important on a biodiversity level. It has many plants, many animals as well and there are also small caves inside and from there you can see the whole city so it's a way for you to see the city or you can see it from the city. So although it has all these characteristics and although it was always privately owned it was always used as a public space for diving, for swimming for the different occasions for the Wednesday of job and for the Kurdish people here in Beirut and for Norak Day but two years ago we saw that it was being prepared to be transformed into a resort, a closed resort only for the elite or for the rich people and as I said Beirut is on the Mediterranean and people cannot go to the beach unless they pay money except for the places that we have in this daily and grocery it's unacceptable to have this fence on the shore forbidding people from going to that place that they always consider as a place for them to interact with the beach one of the people who started this movement so this is a gathering of people that are interested in the city and in reclaiming the open space the public space so we started this campaign and we've had activities for two years we told them to stop their project we've had many artistic programs there we interacted with the people over the fence we used guides so we had a competition as well to have future designs for this place without affecting it all of this so that we can stop this big project we've had also visits from schools for adults and for children to know more about this space and we've had also a popular movement after the garbage issues the youth themselves went there they removed the fence and they liberated this space from this obstacle after that we went to the World Heritage Fund and this place have become observed under this fund in New York and the Ministry of Environment only participating in proposing a draft law to protect this space but until now we don't know any of the plans in this regard of course because of all the political pressure the second example that I will give you is Barakat building this is another space this is the yellow dot and you can see it with all the urban chaos that we have next to it you can see Sama Beirut tower it's called Sama Beirut because after that we won't be able to see the sky of Beirut I discovered this in 1994 this building was on the borders during the war the borders between West Beirut and East Beirut so this was where the borders were so it was open to the sky open to the city and this is why it can interact with the city in a transparent way in a very nice way you can see the sky from inside and you can see how it interacts with all the city so because it was on the borders the snipers and the fighters occupied it and it had become a killing machine so they used it they used this location to kill people in the city and they used their own architecture inside the building in 1997 they wanted to destroy this building as they did with many important buildings but because of the media campaign because of many visits over 13 years I was able to get to a degree so that this building would be appropriated by the municipality of Beirut and be transformed into a museum but it's been until now five years that we are trying for this building to have a cultural policy and a cultural content but the municipality with all the contradictions that we have they paid 20 million dollars to restore the building but they didn't accept to pay only one million for the cultural content so we will always have this debate to get to any kind of culture through public policies now I will end with something that's happening now this is an urban evolution of Beirut you can see the real estate speculations that were able to separate the city from its shore so they want to go higher and higher and this is the only sand shore that is public in Beirut and also today it's facing the risk of being privatized in the future so there are many laws that are being manipulated so that the private ownerships become even more important and take exceptional measures and use the public spaces and then forbid people from getting to the shore you can see this this is just next to this sand shore and you can see there the boats the least expensive one costs 200 or 300 thousand US dollars so my question here and I will end with this question this is Ramlil Baida shore what I want to say is are we doing enough really are we doing enough to reclaim the public space and the open space so that people all people can interact with the city and with art especially people that cannot pay and go to the theater or to artistic performances are we doing something so that people can feel again their citizenship and their belonging to the city within all the problems that we have all the emptiness that we have in our institutions in our country so in this framework we do their own transgressions that are small in the public spaces you can see this guy jumping from the Cornish to the sea because he cannot pay money and go to one of the resorts so what we need to do is to increase our interventions so that people can still interact with the public spaces and open spaces and link city the city to the public space thank you very much thank you without any immediate relationship but Taufik can you talk about your perspective from Marrakesh you studied architect actually but then you worked in theater and this is how you got to dancing I think that you will be speaking in French so what is public space and how can we reclaim it thank you my name is Taufik Zidjou I'm a dancer and a choreographer I'm interested in the pedagogy so two or three years after starting dance I started working on this pedagogy because whatever I have done I have done it against my will this is why I decided one day to switch to dancing I decided to be choreographer because there were no other choreographers so I needed to dance but I needed also to find a choreography for myself so I invented myself as a choreographer I have a dream about a group but I didn't have enough dancers so I needed to train dancers myself to be able to have this play this dancing group there were no festivals or meetings between dancers and choreographers in Morocco then one day I have called upon them so that we can meet all together and this is what led to the festival that we have now it's been 12 years that we have this festival I'm also the director and the inventor of this festival 12 years now I think also this is the case of many choreographers and cultural actors here in the Arab world even before walking they put a big burden on our back and they tell us to run this is why the festival in Morocco is called al-marsh walking by this we mean that walking means also that we will fall down and then we will use this foot and that foot so it's about learning how to walk this is why we named the festival al-marsh and dancing in Morocco is still taking its first steps let's speak a little bit about the public spaces one day in 2005 I don't want to be long I'll try to be as brief as possible so in 2005 I was in a coffee shop in Marrakesh and I was thinking to myself but what can we do so that people will know that there are contemporary dancers in Morocco and are participating in events all over the world presenting Morocco in a very good way so this is how I had this idea of blocking this roundabout for a certain time but I know very good that the government and the system with all the policemen etc will think that I was going to do some kind of a bus and I didn't know that if it would really work and really be able to improve the world of dancing so I said to myself let me be intelligent can we stop it for one hour if I do stop it for one hour what can we do then so here I had like a thousand of questions which dancing contact dancing by itself is a scandal I feel to it in front of the public so we needed to create a new interpretation for it and this is how we invented a new interpretation of our dancing because we didn't want to have something copied from others so we said if you were able to block this roundabout for an hour this is already a very strong action and if it's important that we benefit from it and but I thought that unfortunately maybe the people who came from the left and from the right will consider that we were crazy so we tried to use a traditional music so we arrived to the roundabout and we wanted for one hour to walk along this roundabout with traditional music but they only gave us a small portion of this roundabout at the last minute and until now the permission was only an oral authorization they didn't give us a paper or something solid to be based on so that they can use it on against us if need be so anyway in this space we have calculated it and it contains 100 steps and until now this project is named almost 100 footsteps so we're working now on the 500 steps 400 steps there is also another story about the public space we grew up with obstacles and barriers for example whenever there is a meeting for the council then there are barriers we cannot go past them so for the first time that we went to the public space we also put obstacles and barriers between us and the public now it's been 10 years that we work on the streets the first time we put 40 obstacles now we put only 8 and some ropes between the obstacles so I wish that one day would be able to put nothing between us and our public so there are many issues in this regard many topics and many laboratories of course you will get back to you later on after listening to the questions of the audience Maya it will be your turn please I know that you don't like any authority especially the patriarchal authority so could you please speak about the public space from your perspective hello I love the aspect of capitalism privatization securitization in the public space and then I would like to know more positive thoughts I was jokingly telling a friend few days ago that Beirut is a big construction site and process a simple act of iterating the visibility but the truth of it struck me massively Beirut is a construction site capitalism not only as an economical system but also a system of domination to space occupied our everyday capitalism privatizes as it moves colonizing the lines of the city its parks, its trees and everything like even our visual aspects okay and private spaces become occupied by companies and then highly populated those private security goals that's racially and class profile people according to their own rules they examine our garden for example the problem with capitalism is that it does not confine itself to being only an economical system but under a highly polluting, authoritative regimes such as Lebanon and the inter-urbanist specific these regimes feed into the capitalist limitation of mobility and creating art so how is art and mobility connected the concept of mobility and creating art might be very far away from each other but the commonality between them and what glues mobility and politics play together is the idea that mobility similarly to creating art as a public are both highly policed in order to create art in public spaces you need to be mobile free graffiti is still illegal in Lebanon especially if it's unauthorized by the state or any other state agency it is perceived as vandalizing of public spaces and walls so how do we express art in the public while it's illegal to spray the walls and how do you create art take photography for example music or movies if at one point you are in the streets taking photos of a street a building or anything like something that is appealing to you and a civil-dressed army or police member approaches you to ask you what are you taking photos of or even confiscates your camera and sometimes even detain you for further interrogation policing itself connects both mobility and art in a public space sadly in a country that was mostly overruled by bombings and always so scared of terrorism the state found it's exit to making a secularization more visible through spreading more police in the streets under the claim of protecting its citizens military bases are in many places in the country and many stories have been told about graffiti artists photographers and movie makers getting detained we have to mention that gentrification colleagues on the panel have talked about taking place in most of the Beirut neighbourhood as a constant erection of phallic shades crack rapers all over the city while they are being advertised as their luxurious modern world that are literally while they are literally erasing all the cultural, architectural heritage of Beirut all the old buildings and that is done by other paying big loss of money or small loss of money or by coerging the people who live inside this building to actually leave especially the public and private spaces public space private spaces are not safe places for women to coexist with the rest of the members sexual harassment had and have been used historically and temporally as a tool of an order to assert male dominance over public space subtly directly or indirectly asking women to go back to the private these theoretical claims manifest in the details of the everyday lives of women and those who subvert from the normal gender expression through harassment in the streets public transportation and even inside one's own car if you look around in the public it's very rarely to see women sitting in the street doing nothing this is a concept called loitering they cannot sit in the street just because they can women are mostly always on the way somewhere there is always an aim an un-product in a Marxist sense that need to come out freeing in the public go to work, go to malls go to wherever you want go to your kids in school they always have a mission being out in the public it's rarely to see women in the public just because they can once the reason is harassment the other is the social morality apparatus that kind of tailor all lives take for example jogging on the Corniche day and night whatever you are wearing whatever hour it is you will most likely be harassed and this is what I mean by male dominance it's the acts of asserting a space as male-dominated space through harassment also not to mention that if you ask protection from the police they mostly will harass you as well the lists above are not only the problems in the urban public but I choose those points because they highlight the intersection between the public, race, class, gender and capital itself it's rather frustrating to speak about public space sometimes I think I have to maneuver in circles I get home and I need a group of people to give me a standing ovation congratulations, you have yet to wipe another ray of stress harassment, traffic watching the memory and the history of the city being erased by justification watching the public populate those people begging at the street in order to put food on their tables because the government does not give them their basic human rights of food and water dealing with the police, the intelligent man dealing with man-threading in public transportation and man-threading in conversations and man-corrupting and then dealing with a visual distortion where they turn into a big parking lot for cars the garbage spread all over the country and the noise pollution and what has happened the problem by starting to figure out solutions to those problems and social paradigms that led to them is that we tend to always think of direct answers it's like an equation so we have this problem we have to solve it but then again it is a big leap to only get from one which is the problem to the end project which is the solution so I'm here, I'm just going to try to fix with you a couple of questions of how to really take of a safer public space how can you think of a public space that is harassment free without increasing the level of state policing in it also how can you think of lecturing for women and the rights of the city without taking that right away from other chapters how do we talk about the main dominance in Baywood because of construction work without demonizing construction workers how do we break the stereotypes about the working class as harassers when we all know men in big fancy cars as well police and army members harass as well how can you think about the safer public space without reproducing the same state narrative that chooses the alibi of protecting its citizens never its migrants or refugees by imposing more policing on public spaces and counter public spaces as it will control how do you think about fighting the gentrification in our cities without allowing us to cripple us with frustration and how do you move into the details of resistance without being overwhelmed by the bigger picture of how powerful capitalism is and how powerful those who built their capital on it the ways of economy how do you fight those and resistance how can we still build communities that are interested in political mobilization while those communities are constantly delivering police well you can never trust a stranger because from our experience of political mobilization especially and specifically in the most recent resistance movement the Ustak movement in 2015 that some of the protesters joined the movement like joined the groups, the meetings the resistance even the protest and pretended in their civil dress that they were kind of like protesting civilians such as like similarly to all the people and then turned out to be intelligent intelligent members they are the same people eventually so how can we build trust again in a public space that is constantly regulating us through surveillance how do we as well think of mobility as citizens that is inclusive to non-citizens while municipalities are spreading the country with public service lines for refugees and how do we mobilize against it without giving the state more reasons to impose more curfews how can art become inclusive and emancipatory to all marginalized communities most importantly I need to reiterate here that the most dangerous part of not having a public space or public spaces in general becomes a limitation for communities especially those of politically organized to grow and organize as a mode of resistance against oppression that said it is to be acknowledged that yes, graffiti is legal but most of the walls are sprayed with often very strong statements that are political which are important for social discursive shifts in any social paradigm yes harassment happens to women but women did not retreat from the street they are still there and they hopefully always be yes, gentrification is erasing the face of the city but there are people who are fighting day and night against it against erasing away the heritage sites from where we before the civil war I'm not trying to paint an image that is contrasting to what I have said before my point here is to reiterate that wherever there is oppression there is resistance and whenever there is resistance positive change can be achieved the question is how do we resist against all those factors in the urban without becoming oppressors ourselves to other genders classes, races this is the main question I will leave you with thank you I have a question for you how do we resist against all those factors in the urban without being oppressors thank you as an observation what I would like to say some of the issues that are more than in western european artists face are actually very similar to what I just heard what I would want to add to that is to say that there is a very long history of artists working in a public space which a lot of us here are very familiar with but ultimately it's all about ownership and I think the ownership of space has become a very politicised and very capitalised issue in the last 20-25 years when in the 1960s and 70s when lots of artists in at least for once I know that in the UK and in the Netherlands and other areas of Europe looking to radicalise public space by taking back a sense of ownership of the streets there was also a similar strand of work working in the public space as well from much more conceptual artists who were familiar with it from an abstract for radicalisation so I think those two strands of artists, particularly formal artists working in public space is still very present in contemporary work but the frameworks have shifted so that some of the artists I work with now have become very difficult to work in those areas what was originally seen as being let's take over the public square and reclaim this as a place of proclamation has now become the public square isn't the place where the proclamations could take place because it's entirely capitalised by advertising by private ownership of what were previously seen or at least perceived as being public spaces so that's very similar to what you were saying earlier on about the coast and I think there's also a kind of nostalgic romanticism of this idea of the public space that artists are still kind of to some extent suffering from that it's free, that it's speaking to the people that's engaging with the people and I would maybe provocatively like to suggest that I don't think that's always the case I think that quite often in Western Europe it's less provocative to go and engage with people on the streets in a random way than it is to actually try and exchange in a dialogue about what art means and how we live in our world together so that's in a very short nutshell a kind of response to what has been said the thing that I'm particularly conscious of in my work is that even in a country about amendments which is very liberal and very open country even the outdoors, even nature has become so highly regulated that it's almost impossible to actually try and make work outside of a theatre and a lot of the artists I work with and many others here are more interested in engaging with other spaces as you said earlier in the introduction because it requires a different response to art it requires a different response to what you're experiencing because artists like those are interested in engaging with the public in a meaningful way which isn't coded by the same conventions that a plush theatre or a concert hall or an opera house will do but if we can't even work in found spaces because the regulations are so extreme we can't even work in a park because there's too many permissions that are required to do and most of the time those permissions are so extremely expensive that it's really only possible for a very large event to work in there for a very high crisis but where does that actually leave us so while we may have the advantage in the north and west of Europe of having had a 30-40 years or experience of working in public I don't think we've come very far I think in many ways we've gone back and it's become such a highly charged space here that I'm not entirely connected about it but I think we have to re-challenge how we understand those public spaces and what we're really interested in is having an exchange and a dialogue with the public then perhaps the space isn't the only thing that's important about that and there are other ways of doing that I've got an idea that folks are exploring and it just went the idea came out of the artists because they wanted to go to work to interact in the public space and if the artists have some some pretext or some things that they want to think about when dealing with the media of the public space but the idea came the revolution made us familiar with some issues and the idea was that we have to go to streets not to educate or let the audience to have new ways of expression so we started with El-Mazina project with the street training it started in 2011 and until 2014 the idea was the following we as the artists we will have to go to the streets and to have workshops in the streets with the participation of the public an effort as quick for instance and we will have to convince people to interact with us in these workshops the majority of the workshops were conducted by trainers from Europe from Egypt and from all around the world and the idea was that the population will have to participate in the productive space in order to get rid of the stereotypes related to the elite or the luxurious life led by the artists we led 18 workshops in the streets all the performances were generated from ideas submitted or presented by the population they also participated in training workshops after the training workshops we had training workshops and modern dancing and clowns multimedia we worked as well over the past 3 years on 18 workshops and we have worked in Alexandria we focused our works in Alexandria after works in 2015 we had the street carnival the objective being to exploit all the cumulative experience that we have gained throughout the past 4 years in addition to capacity building led by 140 artists in street workshops the idea was to have a different way mode of production this mode of production will be based on empowerment of minorities present in Egypt the idea of having bad ones as it is and the religious minorities and others so the idea was not to present the problem of minorities back to tackle the positive side of the minorities in order for the population to be defending these priorities instead of us being in a position to defend these minorities so the idea was to go to the street and to spread joy through the carnival to have interaction with us through dancing through singing and at the same time that we embrace i.e. the non-discrimination and the sexual and avoiding sexual harassment harassment were really stressed in 2015 we have worked also in Morocco with African refugees in Palestine and in Palestine in Syria and Alexandria on concerning the sexual harassment the idea was to select the topics that are conflictual in Egypt we told them we have local cultures or some minority related cultures that can give some solutions and the marginalization is not a solution we have to take from them the values that are able to solve some confessional or the issue of minorities in Egypt and actually we are working on some theories that are translated into practice with different types of minorities and we are trying to work more on this issue I want to shift to the last stage which is the street theater in Egypt this was a campaign launched in the beginning of the year the idea was to work on two main goals the first goal was to fund the theater the street theater and second to work on those organizing artistic work in public space we have worked with 12 organizations working in Egypt from organizations having continuous production in public space we launched two studies one analytical study of the needs and difficulties faced by these organizations and the second study conducted was a legal study that revealed that none of these 12 organizations or associations had two bylaws related to the artistic work the laws that are adopted in order to arrest for instance some artists and the streets were the demonstration law so none of these 12 associations were aware of these laws or some artists trying to be granted some licenses in Egypt we have to take these licenses from 5 or 6 authorities and the majority of these authorities cannot grant those permits of those licenses in case there is any problem so they will be sanctioned if they give their approval the so let's say ok they have they grant us all the permission and not a written one we have the law is really this one implemented in Egypt it's sporadically implemented so we are dealing with a certain issue on a case by case scenario we have also merged these two studies in a book with an infographics on each one of the organizations that participated in the survey and we launched a campaign on Facebook the campaign aimed at targeting the audience and not the state or the policy makers in order to tackle the issue of field street plays and theater we had some arguments to deal with policy makers in terms of the benefit that can be generated from the street theater so the solution is that you have to focus on funding and on amending the laws in order to find solutions to many problems so we focused on raising awareness of the public concerning the street theater let's say that you do not have any problem with this kind of theatrical street play I think that we have to convince you in order to facilitate the laws related to the street theater be it on an economic or political from an economic or political viewpoint we are currently working on a strategy and totally stop is to go to some streets some districts in order to choose some public spaces to launch artistic activities or cultural events and the idea behind it is to let these districts benefit from the artistic or cultural events we have worked in a highly marginalized area and farmers and the idea was how to change the image of these marginalized streets and to let these the population in these districts to benefit from their artistic work and cultural, through these cultural events how can they change the image of these marginalized and the reputation of these marginalized streets we have established a map of each district in order to enable the artists to go to the coffee shops for instance or the artistic shops and we will also have an artistic intervention concerning the heritage and the stories that we collected from the population of these districts I think that I have covered all the events related to the public space in Alexandria and I have copies or versions from the study that we have conducted thank you Wahab you will be the last speaker I think you have a presentation quite you have a presentation entitled this sea is mine so is this street still mine you have to answer this question thank you today I'll present to you a project that was done by the telephone but it's not the sea is mine it was that I show you this it was I chose to speak about this project because through it we can ask a few questions related to reclaiming the public space and how it's related to what we're living today Dictaphone group works on live performances this is based on urban researchers so they take the audience to the place that the content of the performance speaks about so we take the audience to that place not only to watch the show but also to interact with the space and build a memory with it the title was Masjid Ad Ali come so that I show you and it was workshops with young people from Saida the idea was public spaces in Saida why did we choose to work on Saida after the project Al-Bahri or the sea is mine that spoke about all the laws concerning Beirut shore and we took people on a boat from Ain Reise and Derye so we thought it was necessary to work also outside the capital where people are facing the same challenges and to ask the questions in a way that is more pertinent to the space where we are if you see a Saida from an aerial photo it's clear what the problems where you see that the shore is being land filled and you see also another port that is being created for the yachts and they are actually burying what was known as the Skandar Bay we have used different photos to show how the city was used before it was a necessary step not just to create a nostalgia towards the past for the city but also to show how people used to interact with the city to confirm this relationship this close relationship between people and the city here this was called Bahel Ayid or the sea of Ayid of the feasts like the what we had before in the woods of Beirut so the sea is between the old city and the shore in Saida where people used to come and use the swings after that we started looking at the map of Saida to see which historical all locations people inside the had relationships with although a lot of them disappeared so and the first phase each participant shows a location inside that they had a relationship with and you worked on that research for each of these locations so we had seven different locations and we started thinking about what really affected these locations in Saida it was clear that highway that was established in the 90s separated the city in two and it destroyed Bahel Ayid or the sea of the feasts it separated the city so the participants had to do a research to see how people used the space before and how they use it now and what allowed others to destroy these spaces and finally the seven participants presented seven shows each of these shows had different titles related to the of the location one was called on the valley on the shore Alexander Bay and then these shows were presented on a land for the municipality at the entrance of Saida you can see that it's surrounded by fence it's neglected but people still go there through a hole that they created in the fence we chose the space because it represents the entrance of Saida because people arrived to the city and there we wanted to introduce them to the city this is why we called this Masjid Daliq or Kamzal that I show you so that I show you Saida of course so we worked on preparing the space on arranging the space so that we could have our shows and we did it on a Sunday so that it's more like a carnival like a festival so we had an interaction with the unexpected audience not necessarily the audience who knew about the show but people who used to go there to look at the sea or to swim the seven shows happened in different places in this place but I will highlight one of these shows it's the show that Abid worked on he's one of the participants in the workshops it was about the sand shore in the old city what we found out through the research we discovered that the sand shore when first the French distributed the estate it was all public spaces but then in 1948 these public spaces on the sea on the shore were transferred to the municipality so this change of ownership that is actually illegal and here you can see the surface that is hundreds of thousands of meters that were transformed to be municipal after they were public and this law was created so that this hotel would be built inside because when the municipality has the ownership has the details through contracts with the public investors the municipality can give them the land to build whatever they want and this shows that this change in politics is not just due to civil war this is actually an economic policy this is a way of looking at development since the creation of the Lebanese state Tanya's hotel was destroyed during the civil war because of the Israeli invasion in the 80s and the location is still empty until now then we saw that there was also another amendment in the law and we hear a lot now inside that this hotel was rebuilt and since the municipality owns the three estates they are preparing for a bigger project much bigger than Tanya's hotel and if you remember the aerial photo this is the only space that is still open to the scene now inside so Abed has done this research and he called his presentation a hotel by the sea with an interrogation mark is important because Abed worked on like redesigning the lobby of the hotel you can see it here and the audience comes and sits with him around the table and he speaks about the new hotel how it will be more glorious than the previous one how it become a private place et cetera so he started interacting with the audience because confronting them was something that could become a reality for them and the discussion was sometimes contradictory because many people in Saida today want to go back to the glorious days of Saida and for them Tanya's hotel was a part of that glorious past so some of them were defending for this place saying that no we don't want something new to be built we cannot say that the hotel cannot be built because some people really wanted and we were trying also to be more active on the level of the research and the arts so that no hotel will be built there on the shore maybe this project led to many important questions when we speak about nostalgia about the past about going back to the Lebanon that we knew before the civil war to which past do we want to go back is it this past because it's also a part of Lebanon's history meaning transgressions violations and this economic policy or is it the other pictures that we saw in the beginning when we see history from the perspective of people and how they decided to use these spaces themselves it was something important because when we see speaking about all Beirut or Beirut heritage there is always a return to pictures and samples related to the city before the civil war and it looks a lot like what we're trying to defend today and the other part is related to the different roles that the artist the researcher, the activist or the resident in the city can play where comes the difference between voicing what the people want and also the residents in the city maybe they're convinced in a certain perspective for development based on what the state said development is maybe development for them is having a hotel and making people work in the hotel and then they will have more people coming to the hotel to the hotel inside because not so many people go to Saida so I wanted to end with these questions that could help us in the later on discussion thank you Abir, how much time do we have? 20 minutes so please, those who want to take the floor please put your hands up and please tell us to whom your question is addressed yes Hassan microphone please although we've worked in theatres and our spaces we have worked actually on a loft and the heart of Cairo but despite that people considered us as being a big space and they considered our relationship as strong with the street as if we couldn't go out of the loft but the street came to us thanks to the space relationship that we created with people through our topics then when the revolution started so what I want to say now is related to revolution first of all in the street in Egypt we have a very high dynamic so our street needs a special kind of work or else our street will eat this work I have seen in Al-Mayadeen and in Alexandria different kinds of theatrical work but the spaces absorbed and devoured and they looked first at them with generosity but at the end they were stronger in their daily life they were stronger than the show or the play and the strongest thing that happened in Egypt was Madanat Tahir Tahir Square once I went there and I had asked a lot about Al-Mawarid and I think that hundreds of thousands were there in Al-Mayadeen so they were really affected by the ambience that was there and we saw a lot of intimacy in Tahir Square but after it was emptied so days after it was emptied I saw someone had written an Egyptian saying I don't know if you have it in your countries saying that when you're lucky there is an hour that will not be repeated again and also the luckiness is intimacy so I saw this actually what I saw in front of luckiness is the band because in Arabic it's so I work a lot also in Germany this is why I wasn't able to be during the revolution but many people from those whom we have trained started doing something within the revolution and some of them adopted arts that they used on the Cornish and it's one of the oldest Cornishes in Egypt Al-Minyah Cornish and they decided to go to the soldier who was there because there were soldiers protecting the building of the governorate of course they didn't know what his quality was but they decided to take a statement from the soldier they told him we need to do a show here on the Cornish actually they wanted a permission from so they told them you are now doing a revolution but you want my permission for a show so so this has happened actually in Egypt this has happened in a very specific moment thank you very much Hanan this panel is very important because it mixes research to activism to citizenship to arts to artistic performances to feminism in a very organic way I would like to thank really everyone I will not have the time to ask deep questions to all of you I could speak for hours with each of you especially me this panel was really important for me but there was a word that was repeated and it made me sometimes curious it was said by a lot of you and it was implicit for some of the others you spoke about nostalgia and the public spaces the presence of Raquel is also very important with this panoply of Arab and regional artists then Abyr said that it's not just nostalgia it's to speak in the language of the people and how they see their history how they see their life and how their life was a square for joy and for love and for feeling their own existence so I don't know how it is possible for Raquel to explain this nostalgia and what is proposed now this is really problematic and I think we should chat the light on it more is it addressed to someone as specific as it's because Raquel mentioned it Abyr as well and also the perspective of Maya is important to me to complete what Hanan has just said I have a question this was actually mentioned but maybe we can widen it even more when it comes to war so construction reconstruction as a Syrian I see my whole country being destroyed so I saw all this coming but your role is very important and now you are carrying all this burden of reconstruction and all this pressure of war so while war is happening what can we do which measures can we take so that we don't reach this phase where a lot of transgressions are done so what can we do I know there is no magic but can we do something really strong while preparing for the reconstruction that will contain a lot of greed transgressing the public spaces demographic destruction etc thank you let us first take the questions then each of you will take the floor to answer I have a question and a comment my first question is to Mona you spoke about Barakat building in Beirut you spoke about a figure of 20 million dollars that were paid by the municipality of Beirut in cooperation maybe with other funding partners and what is the relationship or what is the reason why the municipality refused to pay for a cultural policy for this building and are there any ways of alternative cooperation maybe with the ministry of culture I don't know that maybe it's not under the the ministry because the building is owned by the municipality but have you thought about other ways for funding this cultural policy because all people are waiting for what will happen in this building since before 2012 as for Abyir speaking about our relationship with the public and open space and then the relationship with the authority since the beginning of the Lebanese government here I have an observation I don't know if it's correct but all the public institutions that should be a part of the public space made by the Lebanese government for example the public library the public library actually we're still waiting for it to be reopened it was created based on an individual initiative by Afred Tarazi in 1921 then we had the tramway of Beirut that was made by the Turkish the same goes for the national conservatoire so I don't know if we can generalize this idea that the interests that we had were not actually there since the Lebanese government or state was created because they had other interests that is dividing all the pieces of the cake so that was since 1948 so I have 1943 so I have this understanding I don't know if you agree with me thank you Mono any other questions comments because I would like to give the last word to the participants yes ma'am they're moving in rebuilding many many cities from all over the world they're no longer allowed to get to the sea or water sources or anything so I'm putting trust in it but even in our own city in London which we have not been suffering like you have squares and roads and whole areas of London are now privately owned so if you want to do a project there you have to get permission the company that owns the square is far away the other side of the world it is a huge problem which should all be I think it was really interesting thank you very much for that it's been a really good panel thank you back to that it was one way that I I think it's increasingly I think that the public have become having senses of how ours can be performed in public space and this is a particular problem for western Europe in that some of the more radical and conceptual ways in which artists are engaging in public as in a public space is that question there's issues of ownership and a lot of the public who are saying we don't want this and looking for it to be banned in some way so even in western Europe which is liberal and open etc there are lots of issues around freedom of expression and the ability to express yourself but in response to some of the other points that were made I think that nostalgia is a problem for western Europeans I think that there's too much of a harking back to how it was before as if that was better and I think that that's an issue that artists have to engage with in a more exciting way perhaps than just in facing the public space as being the area where it's possible to be public because I think people do public in other ways and engaging in other ways which doesn't always have to be harking back to something that was better before It's been 5 years that we're working in this theater in the streets and now the institutions or the groups that we're working in that some of them have disappeared some of them have stopped of course we have the problems the funding problems but we have also other problems because actually it's the state that pressured funding entities to stop giving money to these groups and there was an aggressive treatment of these affairs and the public space and we see that it's the Baltagia that are doing this so if you go to do a show in the streets or to draw something on the walls they tell people that this is a problem so what we're trying to do now is to help artists not to stop working in the streets and all the institutions that started doing this we are encouraging them not to stop because then progressively the street theater will disappear from the public spaces that's it this is your reply to Hassan that says that sometimes the street can devour the show of course there are different levels of art works and the public space and even if the street ain't the theater play this is also something important now if we have confrontation from the people or there are other things then I think that even this is a good plan even if the people ate it and I think it's really beneficial for us as long as we can stay there for 4 years there were political altercations between the governor and the head of the municipality and there was something also personal in politics so I won't pass this project for you because I don't want you to get all the credits in front of the people then with the new governor we discovered or this is what I think the building was being completed and it was something wrong to have it completed without its content so now they're afraid about what to put in the building how will we deal about all the different things that are said about it how will we work also on controlling what will be put there so in an implicit way we're working on a way so that the public funds are not exploited wrongly so now we're discussing this with the governor and since the mayor of Paris is visiting we we're working so that we will have in a few weeks a legal structure for it so let's see if it will really happen unfortunately the building belongs to the municipality and the money also comes from the municipality and the inhabitants of Beirut from the tax money this is something that I think always about when I see my Syrian friends and I take them to Beirut or to this building yes this danger is coming to you this danger is imminent for you and here there are two concerns the first one is archiving because you will see that many things have disappeared there is destruction before the war and in the aftermath and you need to raise the awareness of people about reconstruction it can be dangerous if it doesn't take the social dimension into consideration and downtown in Beirut is the example about that you need also to raise the awareness about the importance of pressuring for their and lobbying for their rights so imagine that they would have accepted to cut the Raouche rock and take it elsewhere so I don't know what happened in Syria during the war but there are things that you could do I will start now with nostalgia I see that a lot of things that we work on there is always a focus on history and we say that turning to the past is not just for nostalgia it's also because it's clear in all our struggles that there is always a question about our history how was it written and what is the image of the city the whole time in our head we wanted to have all pictures of this place to see how people used this place before where the authority and official entities showed the daily and the Raouche only as the rock or the hotels that were built in the 60s or the new cars that we see on the modern roads of Raouche so why the officials only show that and this is the modern picture that is not related to people that live there to the people that use this territory to people that bring their food and eat there in this space on the floor so there was the struggle to show the history of our city and this is the alternative history and this is what is essential not nostalgia itself but what you said the Monon I think here there is something very clear related to the economic policy that our country was built upon so in the 40s, 50s and 60s there were many public projects done by authority but these projects were only made to serve this economic policy based on tourism and services so laws were made to establish highways but they didn't use the money for popular units of residence or for creating public spaces no the state wanted projects that only served its interest and the interest of the merchants that started the state and they didn't care about the interest of people and economics in general and now I will end with a proverb also related to gender and to see how sometimes women's issues are used for privatization in the 60s there were a lot of projects and 60s before the war so there were a lot of projects like resorts, private resorts and Dajna Sensenu and Uzay and if you look at the different magazines that were written in French back then all the pictures were pictures of girls in their bathing suits saying that finally women can now go to the beach and this class of people that back then was able to put these bathing suits and go to resorts were only used as a justification to establish these places and then later on to close them I would like only to add one thing to what Abir said sometimes the western press tries to use women or the presence of women as an exception for example and the demonstration and the demonstrations that we had in Lebanon for youth think movement there were western journalists doing interviews with women and asking them how do you feel about being here in public demonstrations and actually as I remember after 2005 demonstrations women is the movement where we had most of the demonstrations done more than the others so they had a lot of demonstrations before this movement before youth think movement but I think that western journalism tends sometimes to exceptionalize the presence of women in public although they're all over the place but I think that I think that we're stuck in a stagnant position about the 70s I know from my parents when they speak about the 70s and people who lived back in the 70s they would say everything was nice we had public spaces but if you think about it if it were really like that would we have had this civil war because this is related also to sectarianism so this is the point about Nostalgia we always go back to the past only to focus on one point because we don't have a history everything was removed from our city there is only maybe this building that will become a museum for war so it's not something that is taught in our curricula schools we always stop our history on the second world war so that they won't speak about civil war and then they speak directly about the Ta'af agreement it's nice that this is not the objective from these pictures the objective is to show how things were before that's it one more point we know that in Beirut yes there is surveillance but also in Europe and in the US so I think that surveillance is something global with neoliberalism that's it this is what I wanted to say so Beirut is not an exception to this liberal system where everything becomes surveilled thank you microphone please or else I can't translate I just want to say that there was a new research about Damascus and Aleppo linking the the conflict urban planning and I think this is a pre-emptive measure for the conflict that could also start other than this conflict and this is also related to justice and urban planning and how it can need to conflict itself thank you after all these topics about freedom of expression dancers and the public space I think it's worth sharing something with you in the last edition of En March in March we had many contemporary dancers and it was organized by our company and we created our first for dancers in Morocco our read that maybe it will give you ideas I don't know if this was done in other Arab countries or if this can inspire you so I invite all artists and dancers in other countries to do the same thing to pressure the Minister of Culture because they have the money so they need to give it to us so that we can do our work asking for money here and there so thank you this is a special statement for dancing in Morocco so dancers, choreographers artists, the audience and the citizens in Morocco we also use the opportunity of this 11th edition of the International Festival for Dancing in Morocco upon all the institutional attitudes it has been 15 years of creativity it's been 15 years of exchanging dynamism and the knowledge just through individual works that led to these syndicates and we have had festivals so it was a really nice dynamism where all the actors worked through individual actions that were able to improve professional groups and create an international festival this has also contributed and giving a very nice image of Morocco we were aware of what happened lately in Morocco of difficulties related to dancing and artists there are also other disciplines as you know but there are no tools of exchanging knowledge there are no places for work and there is also more creation this is why all of us amateurs and professionals and dancing artists, academics the audience and the citizens we demand that you recognize these institutions in Morocco through having a cultural policy to support dancers and choreographers today and tomorrow in training, creativity and publishing of their works and also in creating strategies for them so that they can have good performances that are economically viable and should have all ways of dancing education which will allow the individuals and the groups of working more and creating better dances, thank you so we will end with this manifesto, thank you very much for your attention, I would like to thank the IETM once more and we wish you more prosperity, dialogue and success, thank you