The obsessive exploration of liminal spaces is at the core of Emilie Mansour’s artistic experimentations, reflecting on the fast and violent metamorphoses of a city. How women artists, especially writers, can participate in defining a city, in discovering the “soul” of an ever-changing urban object? Hence engaging in a conversation that challenges binary narratives often used when tackling Gender, Women or Postcolonial questionings – Masculine/Feminine, East/West, Local/Global, Fiction/Real, White/Minorities, Center/Periphery, Private/Public, etc. Emilie explores the geographic, the urban, memory, bodies as not fixed objects but volatile entities; she investigate intersections of movement, poetic experimentation, writing and urban landscape as liminal zones of entry to a unique understanding of the often-forgotten blurred interstices of an urban environment. Her questionings led her to create the concept of Urbigraphy, that she first introduced in her PhD Thesis “Women in Wartime Beirut (1975-1990). A Geocritical Approach to the Beirut Decentrists”.

Urbigraphy offers stimulating opportunities and necessary developments. What does it mean to be an artist citizen in regions (Global South) where issues of history, memory, heritage, culture, “post-fossil” future, sustainable development, are being accelerated even more than anywhere else? How artistic and cultural practitioners follow and anticipate this acceleration? How to deal with a memory and a future happening at the same time? This is an incredible opportunity for artists to reflect on this schizophrenic/uncomfortable thus and yet inspiring state. Are we protagonists of reforms and changes or are we guardians of a heritage? Can we be both and how can we be both? Finally, in a world where two-thirds of the population will live in urban areas by 2050, how can we, artists, answer one of the most critical questions: “What is it that we hope to sustain?”

Projects

The Urbigraphs Walk Series