RESIST, RECORD, REMEMBER

Existing, documenting, archiving: an interactive space to reflect, express, and imagine SWANA lives and stories of our past, present, and future. Featuring a public art canvas | zine making station | video booth inviting members of the community to leave their marks and visually document what it means to exist in a moment of widespread erasure.

*This will be a self facilitated space with a guided zine making session from 4PM*

This workshop invites participants to collectively challenge the traditional concept of archiving, from motive to medium. Offering a warm space of open dialogue, this workshop welcomes new ideas and explorations of archiving as a practice, alongside practical demonstrations and accessible audio production tools to develop technical skills needed to build your own sonic archive. We journey together to preserve family, community and personal histories through audio recording and archiving – all experience levels welcome!

This workshop is led by Olivia Melkonian of Young Shubbak. She is a producer, DJ and sonic archivist who has worked across radio, record labels, film production and the cultural sector. Invested in projects of cultural preservation, Olivia archives dialect, ritual and collective memory with a focus on family and the home. Through her practice, she presents memory as a tool of resistance, and recording as an act of revolution.

Book your free tickets for this workshop here.

This is a panel conversation – reimagined. We bring together an ensemble of writers, publishers, and theatre makers in conversation with Young Shubbak to talk about how to (and perhaps more pertinently why we should) continue writing amidst all the destruction and ongoing horrors of the world we’re living in. For decades, even centuries, writers and storytellers of the SWANA region have been encouraged to perform in order to gain attention and acclaim for the stories that matter to them, the stories that are lived realities. And yet, nothing changes for people across the region despite our greatest attempts at rescuing and remembering them with language.

What, if anything, happens then? Where do we go from here?

Young Shubbak writers Youssef Khaireddine and Mariam Tell in conversation with Sabrina Mahfouz, Hassan Abdulrazzak, Carmen Nasr, Elizabeth Briggs (and our guests).

Stay back for a drink and share some delicious snacks to decompress, unwind and connect with the artists and Young Shubbak – to find solace and ease in the knowledge that we’re all in this together and we celebrate our existence with radical joy, fierce commitment and a shared solidarity.

We hope you will join us for a day of resisting, recording, and remembering!