4.351261
RAAFAT
THE KHAN, BRUSSEL
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While coerced by an undesirable selection of Masters Spring Studio classes- bearded men sitting behind a vivid screen, squatting the eyes of Mawkathan for hours- I knew that these students, as part of their dossiers study at UTS, have the potential of becoming an essential interaction within my new Arabia. Entering their virtual space from across the world in Beirut, I was right. Their task of adopting my methodology by pushing the boundaries of العربيةliterature while being unafraid to employ flagrant narratives to underline key contemporary issues within the Khan Brussels make them one of my most promising authors working on the Middle East today. I could not have been prouder to collaborate with the Virtual Khan, Mawkathar’s creative space that conceptualizes and produces narratives across different media from architecture to novels.
Surrounded by the realm of the transactional and the economy of fiction, Hekmat places my belongings in the borderless corner of the open yet closed room “Feiruz and Oum Kulthum sit beside you’re bed awaiting you’re luscious ears”, he said in a cheeky manner. With a smirk on my face as I shove Hekmat out of view, I begin to glaze at the 3 clocks above the piano. “They all display 10:25 pm” Hekmat explains before I get to question it. I am currently sitting in a durational performance reflecting on the different border conflictions in Palestine, Occupied Palestine, Israel and Lebanon. Overwhelmed by the generating new system of currency outside capitalism and the people gazing onto the Arab concierge from above, I gaze back and break the surveillance dynamic. Mawkathar attempts to comfort me with his grandmother’s experiences of the war “in a few hours we, women, ejaculate lives
out of our doomed corpses, while our men hunt lieutenants to top, figurines of authority to conquer. I left Zarif in Alexandria to Ahmad and the likes of Ahmad” she says while twirling the dark, middle eastern hairs on my chest.
I begin to interpret this space as a venue for policy research and urban-scale projects rooted in the act of writing as architecture. A sense of power courses
through my veins as I abuse this space, using it as a governing force for my fictional world.