This collection of letters to those who have offered companionship and camaraderie in the least likely of moments and times stems from a desire to remember and honour love as it emerges in ‘the face of loss and genocide’. The letters open with a story of a Sawt Al-Shaab (Voice of the People radio) five hour radio broadcast between Lebanese artist Ziad Rahbani and journalist Doha Shams and others, recorded in Beirut against the backdrop of the lingering Qana massacre of 1996, where the Israeli Occupation Forces destroyed a UN compound in South Lebanon, claiming the lives of over 106 civilians taking refuge. The letters that follow, to culture workers, booksellers and a literary magazine, reflect on the material conditions of cross-border labour and labour in the midst of conflict, the value of poetics, of shaping new political imaginaries, of tending to what intuition offers for revolutions of many scales and seasons. ‘This garden’, writes Fehras, ‘is a paradise of undoing, where weeds and brambles begin to digest the enclosure, and vines embrace the hinges of the gate’. The momentum of what Tsing might call a different form of accumulation, a rewilding.
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Photo: A journey to Bisan Bookstore in Beirut, 2023. A book published by Women’s Research & Documentation Center – Unesco, 1st edition, 2015, Al-Bireh, Palestine. Fehras Publishing Practices
Fehras Publishing Practices was co-established in 2015 in Berlin. We are a cultural workers collective holding emotional capital, grandmother’s wisdom and loyalty to our ancestors. Our work engages in various participatory methods and artistic productions, focusing on the relationship between publishing and history-making. We examine the role of publishing as a tool to combat cultural domination, as well as a means to foster solidarity and deconstruct colonial power. Fehras serves as an observatory for publishing strategies and practices in relation to the geo-political transformations of southwest Asia and North Africa.
Our research is based on our intuition, desires and concerns. We utilize archival materials, including books, magazines, photographs, memoirs, letters, contemporary art publications, and the libraries of authors, publishers, and book sellers. We collect, organize, and re-curate these materials, placing them in diverse spatial and temporal landscapes. We enact publications and reflect their sorties with various mediums. We instrumentalise tools of architecture, design, performance, embroidery and our bodies to witness, protest, map, and investigate politics of (non-conforming) and marginalized bodies in urban spaces and the archives. Our method of demarking boundaries in front of the audience is based on extensive cohabitation and sharing bread and salt, a practice we call Moasherat.
Fehras upholds publishing as a means of creating, transferring, and disseminating knowledge. Consequently, we initiate projects in various forms, such as exhibitions, films, books, lectures, performances, and Moasherat. Our practices address issues that concern them; gender, collectivity, identity, migration, emancipation, funding, and institutions. Fehras Publishing Practices includes Kenan Darwich, Nancy Naser Al Deen, Sama Ahmadi and Sami Rustom.
fehraspublishingpractices.org