Loulwah Kutbi, “Fi Adab Al Sadaqa: e(xilic)ncounters”,
reading group
26 July 2024, 19:30
BERLIN, S&T RESIDENCY, ARCHIVE
“Fi Adab Al Sadaqa: reading e(xilic)ncounters” proposes the co-creation of a reading circle centered on letter exchanges between Arab artists. Inspired by Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the exilic optic, this initiative aims to challenge unified cultural narratives and highlight fragmented, diverse identities in the globalised age. The reading circle acts as a gesture towards intersubjective relations and seeks to address political anxieties and spectral presences that reveal the complexities of cultural identity in exile.
The first session will explore the history of epistolary literature and the politics of friendship, followed by a co-reading of the letters and a discussion. The focus will be on letters exchanged between Damascus and Berlin, retrospective locations of exile shared by writer Abdulrahman Munif and painter Marwan Kassab-Bachi. By engaging with these letters through the logic of a situated encounter, the reading circle will explore the relational spaces opened by these exchanges and approach reading as an embodied and lived practice.
Free admission. Limited capacity. Register here.
Language: Arabic, English
Duration: 60 min.
Doors open at 19:00. Event starts at 19:30
Language: Arabic, English
Duration: 60 min.
Doors open at 19:00. Event starts at 19:30
Loulwah Kutbi is an independent writer and researcher based in Jeddah and London. She has a background in cultural studies, political philosophy and visual anthropology from Birkbeck, University of London and UCL. Her research/writing practice concerns itself with notion of exilic optics, the politics of location, archival interventions and ethnographic forms of witnessing as seen through visual and literary mediations of migration and exile. She has written for Mathqaf and worked on audio and media research projects in exhibition contexts; focusing on non-centralised archiving practices emerging from public testimony and participation as a means to navigate the tensions between memory and history.
The residency is supported by Art Jameel and Goethe-Institut Saudi Arabia part of a three years collaboration with Slavs and Tatars to support young practitioners from Saudi Arabia.