New Middle East

With an annually recurring city cycle, Moussem’s Nomadic Arts Centre offers an insight into contemporary Arab societies and the dynamic of their cities. Every year, an Arab city is a guest in the capital of Europe. Over the course of this ten-day festival, guest artists, relevant thinkers and cultural players tell the story of their city through their work.

Inspired by an old map of the Middle East – which clearly shows how many cross-border train connections there once were, Dictaphone Group went on a research mission along the entirely disused railway network in modern-day Lebanon. Nothing to Declare is about the meaning of borders within Lebanon, borders with the neighbouring countries and borders in the Arab world.

Sirine Fattouh guides you through a piece of Lebanese history based on a personal selection of artworks. She hereby focuses on three specific moments: the end of the civil war in the late nineties, the assassination of the former prime minister in 2005, and the Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 2006.

In 1918, as WW1 was gradually drawing to a close, François Georges Picot and Mark Sykes – a French and a British diplomat respectively – were studying the map of the Middle East. In a secret agreement, they redrew the borders, and the consequences of this act can still be felt today. In Vanishing State, Lucien Bourjeily gives you the chance to go through this exercise afresh, in the full knowledge of what has happened in the Levant over the past hundred years.