Seven participants, a city imagined on seven hills and her surroundings, one month of working collaboratively and separately towards imagining, re/presenting, perhaps capturing what could be known as earth memory. Who re-members, and why? Is earth memory traceable in and for separately existing individuals or simply in the interaction of a collective created through that interaction? Could acts of rapid publishing – such as image-making, writing, typing, performing, producing objects, planting forests, harvesting seeds, and listening – bridge between the two? Earth memory is an archive embedded in our bodies as well as the landscapes surrounding and shaping us and to which we turn our attention in a shifting world, urgently attempting to shape them as much as they shape us. Earth memory, individual and collective as co-constitutive?

In our studio exhibition, we engage in building a collective or turning the studios into a collective building; 3ouneh - a social and societal building practice bypassing blueprints and roadmaps as forms of staging an imaginary before forging it into reality. Instead, this form of communing relies on sharing understanding, intuition, and trust spontaneously rather than on absolute and practiced truths. We invite audiences into our exhibition to co-investigate earth memory: fictional and real, preserved and lost, speculative and documented, as it manifests in the city, the archive, archaeology, and the earth itself.

Participants: Deema Dabis, Hanna Al Taher, Lina Asa'ad, Sama Shahrouri, Sarah Risheq, Sara Sukhun, and Tasneem Zraikat. The Darat al Funun Summer Academy 2022 program is curated by Rana Beiruti.