Design to Live: Everyday Inventions from a Refugee Camp
2021
Choreographies of Proposal
April 19, 2025
1:00 pm–1:30 pm
Africa Hall
Al Manakh, Sharjah
Dialogue (YAZ Publications Activation)
Daniela Castro (experimental artist-curator, writer, researcher); Raafat Majzoub (artist)
Moderator: Zeynep Öz (independent curator and Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry co-curator)
Raafat Majzoub (SMACT ’17) and Daniela Castro discuss how the politics of collective activity, the power of fiction and choreographies of resistance manifest in their artistic work. They reflect on building new systems—or slipping between the cracks of the old—through malleability, weaving and the refusal of policing and legibility. Their conversation considers the generative potential of being together as a radical act of dissent and proposal.
This event is part of the Sharjah Biennial 16’s April Acts 2025: to carry new formations.
Just as a final scene comprises an invisible history of rehearsals, repetitions, improvisation and reenactments, so April Acts seeks to recognize the multi-vocal processes, edits, iterations and exchanges that render a unified gesture. The theme of this three-day program, to carry new formations, builds on the title for Sharjah Biennial 16, to carry. Highlighting the Biennial as an ongoing generative process, to carry new formations is to re-think, re-value and re-shape knowledge for this moment and for the future of communal dignity—to materialize new ways of being with each other and the world.
to carry new formations centers old knowledge reimagined in new forms, which are often embodied in civic movements and acts of solidarity stretching beyond bordered geographies and linear time. The program includes riso-print workshops, listening sessions, guided walks and film screenings. It explores the possibility of using sound as an agent to carve new spaces, and collective listening as a means for navigation. Each day ends with a performance on He Korero Purakau mo te Awanui o te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river (2011), the red fully carved Steinway concert grand by Maori artist Michael Parekowhai, while performances under the umbrella of The Farm Project develop on sound installations by Başak Günak, Berke Can Özcan, Sandy Chamoun and Hauptmeier I Recker. The performance WATER (reprise) by Koleka Putuma explores ancestral memory in bodies of water. The program includes an exchange for young curators in Southeast Asia and the UAE, led by Alia Swastika and Jo Lene Ong, to create space for collective wayfinding, offering a moment to reflect on what we must reimagine in order to carry forward new formations of support, resistance and continuity.
April Acts: to carry new formations proposes Sharjah Biennial 16 not as a culmination, but rather as an opening to the multivalent processes that informed its journey and will continue to shape its afterlife.
