Imagining 3alam Badil (alternative worlds)
Workshop within Faraoyść - Thesis Work
What if we could imagine a world without the oppressive systems of the current day? What if we did that while centering the emotion of liberated joy, or faraoyść?
In April 2021, 18 Lebanese Negligence Refugees asked themselves that question. Collectively they created 6 speculative objects and names that they believed could help create an Alternative Lebanon.
Our work demonstrated that the experience of imagination from a place of faraoyść allowed for liberatory joyful realities, strategies, and tactics to empower those who are already living, working, and striving in a space of the alternative.
In Part One, participants wrote stories about their memories, using the Lebanese childhood story construction “Kan Yamakan fi kadim il zaman...” (Eng: Once upon a time).
They then engaged in a co-creative exercise imagining speculative objects and naming them based on their stories-objects that could be used to build an alternative Lebanon.
In the second part, participants used digital illustrations of the objects on blaat chaya-styled tiles that we had created. They placed them in a grid along with a story of how they all connected to each other.
“We decided that we wanted to to put all the politicians in a dump similar to the one of they created in the “qarantina” area and then cut that piece of land and send it off to sea as a punishment...these politicians wear the shoes they feel every single cruelty that they've done and suffering...ya’ni it's a constant feeling of all the people that suffered because of them. They feel what they're feeling for life while smelling the trash. The drone and the shoe are a double torture on this garbage mountain - a continuous one. Then the people who remained in Lebanon we put the USBD so we have a fresh start all of us on a good basis, you know, a common story ...because I think we felt that every time we want a solution it's like, we take the chainsaw and detach [ourselves], whereby they should be the ones detached...It's not always us we need to leave and always to be cut out...khalas...use the chainsaw in a different way and cut them out, henneh (them) ..”
