To act in situ is to enter a space already shaped by enduring forces. Practices, laws, infrastructures, memories, and absences. No gesture operates on a blank slate; each responds to what is already there. It contends with memory, adapts to conditions, and is shaped by the site’s own dynamics. A site, then, is not merely a backdrop, it is a layered field of meaning and constraint, a collaborator, even a critic, with the power to enable or resist what becomes possible.

Yet the dynamics of a site are never only local. Today, the density of such forces is especially compounded, as spatial and temporal currents fold distant events, historical legacies, and abstract systems into the textures of everyday life. A video of collapse elsewhere arrives as swiftly as a neighbour’s message. The objects we touch bear the imprint of faraway economies. Data gathered in one place recalibrates how another is surveilled. Even language carries sedimented histories across time that quietly govern what may be seen, said, or imagined.

To act, then, is always to act within a web of relations, material, historical, affective, and invisible. The question is not whether to engage this entangled field, but how.

It is within this terrain that Darat al Funun’s Summer Academy 2025 “Rehearsing Realities” takes place. The program invites emerging artists and creative practitioners to explore this how through site-specific interventions, conceived as rehearsals, across Darat al Funun’s campus. These provisional acts unfold within a live field, testing how space, bodies, and imagination relate, collide, or cohere. Each becomes a negotiation with the site: tracing hidden structures, staging encounters, drawing out silences, or inscribing presence where none is expected.

Over five intensive weeks, participants will develop their work in close dialogue with the particularities of the site, asking: What forces compose this place and act within it? What becomes thinkable or possible here? What shape might the intervention or work assume? What frictions or openings emerge when one intervenes? How might an artistic act disturb, reroute, or reframe a lived reality?

In short, the question is not only what to make, but how to make “here”.

Raeda Saadeh, whose exhibition Dear Viewers is currently on view at Darat al Funun, leads the Academy as primary mentor. Her performative, disquieting and site-attuned practice sets the tone for the program. Alongside her, invited mentors will lead workshops and conversations to support participants as their interventions unfold.

Primary teaching will be in Arabic, but some readings may be in English.

Programme Structure

Phase 1 · Explorations (22 June – 17 July)

A series of workshops will expand participants’ toolkits—introducing methods, critical approaches, media techniques, and readings led by a range of mentors. This phase will also include an introduction to Darat al Funun’s layered campus, alongside site visits and walks through the city. In this period, lead mentor Raeda Saadeh will offer one-to-one online tutorials, guiding each participant in developing a proposal that is both conceptually grounded and technically viable.

Phase 2 · On-Site Rehearsals (17 July – 31 July)

Saadeh joins the cohort in Amman for collective critiques and studio sessions. Projects move from page to place. This phase culminates in the completion of participant interventions and their presentation to the public. Throughout the whole of the academy Darat al Funun’s Lab space will function as an open studio: a shared space for exploration, exchange, and early experimentation.

• Applications are open to individuals currently residing in Jordan or Palestine.
• Submission: Complete the online form, which asks for: A portfolio (up to eight works) and short answers outlining your initial research interests
• Deadline: 1 June 2025 (23:59 GMT+3)
• Notification: Applicants will hear back by 4 June 2025.
• Accommodation is provided for participants coming from outside Amman.
• Commitment: Full-time studio presence is expected throughout the five-week programme. Sessions and workshops will take place on an average of three times per week. Full attendance is required.
• Primary teaching will be in Arabic, but some readings may be in English.