Curator Nour Osseiran developed this proposal during the 2022 Curatorial Intensive in Kampala.
I stretch so I may not break is a curatorial exploration of un-rooting, un-earthing, un-folding.
A study of movement, immigration and exile
An investigation of fiction and knowledge, through their production and propagation
An embodiment of elasticity, of existing in multitudes,
of surviving
of living forever
Lebanon is a nation of movement.
Geographically, it sits atop a tectonic plate.
Historically, it served as a port for export and trade.
Socially, we’ve been conditioned to be prepared to flee at a moment’s notice.
The civil war ravaged the country for 15 years, and since the 1990’s, we’ve had almost yearly bouts of political upheavals. October 2019 marked a revolutionary moment, weakened by the Covid-19 pandemic, absolutely destroyed by the August 4 explosion.
The airport has been a cemetery of homes left behind.
The Lebanese people are based between Beirut and the world. There is this constant tension of flight and settlement. Of displacement and grounding.
Contemporary artists have navigated questions of exile and home through various practices, they’ve lived in multitudes on Lebanese soil and abroad, and tethered themselves, weaved spider webs across the mediterranean and mapped roads of belonging without touching the ground.
How do you stretch the confines of your body,
embody potentialities
stretch yourself, dig into the earth, look up to the sky
look into your family archives, and set up parafictions
of what could have been, what has been, what the future will look like
there is knowledge that is produced, and shared,
When you’re constantly on the move (and not because you want to be)
Those are ways of living
modes of learning
approaches to survival
processes to live forever, in the work, in the memory, in the archive
the skin is a limit
the body is a potential
unfolding, unearthing, undergoing, unmasking, and unbinding
to overcome the confines of truth
Movement as vehicle through which you navigate the world and assert yourself in it
This is an invitation to explore the multiple and diverse ways in which we can stretch
– here meaning to spread and extend to its utmost capacity until it reaches its breaking point
– our work and practice thus allowing us to move into another dimension of truth
– understood here as fact or, more precisely, possibility of being.
The project is a series of conversations between artists, writers, and thinkers.
It lives in suspended time, de-rooted from a physical space.
