Arcana’s first project Once Upon A Blue Moon manifested as a forest weekend retreat, which invited a group of women to gather and spend time together in the woods of Reshmayya, on the eve of the second full moon of October, 2020. An unusual happening, which happened to coincide in timing with the organizing team’s rising anxieties and questions around coping with the uncertainty of the present moment and a deep desire to grieve together.
Melissa Ghazale and Stephanie Hobeika designed workshops with guest speakers, prepared activities, and a food menu – all attuned to thinking through togetherness and what care and sharing knowledge can look like outside the preset notions. Under the floodlight of the moon, somewhere along the river stream, around a small fire, the campground became a portal. The wind carried resonances of laughter, songs and echos of conversations about dreams, hopes, anxieties, triggers, the port explosion, rage, precarity, the cosmos, horoscopes, tarot, lunar attunement, rituals, menstrual cycles, friendship, sisterhood, misogyny, sexuality, gender, violence, transformation, magic, other worlds and a range of topics in between.
Melissa Ghazale and Stephanie Hobeika designed workshops with guest speakers, prepared activities, and a food menu – all attuned to thinking through togetherness and what care and sharing knowledge can look like outside the preset notions. Under the floodlight of the moon, somewhere along the river stream, around a small fire, the campground became a portal. The wind carried resonances of laughter, songs and echos of conversations about dreams, hopes, anxieties, triggers, the port explosion, rage, precarity, the cosmos, horoscopes, tarot, lunar attunement, rituals, menstrual cycles, friendship, sisterhood, misogyny, sexuality, gender, violence, transformation, magic, other worlds and a range of topics in between.
ARCANA III: On horoscopes, tech magic, and space witches draws from the spectral energies that were conjured that night and the many reflections that have manifested since. Taking on a digital dimension, the three day online program opens with a musical performance by Andy Khouloussy, a horoscope chart reading talk with Samar Al Summary, an introduction into Batool Desouky’s work, a performance by Sarah Huneidi with Carla Habib and Nadine Makarem, and screening of Rosa Nussbaum’s interactive installation Space Witches.
This edition invites us to delve into multiple methodologies, mediums, and multiverses; summoning elements from the magical and maleficent realms of digital technology, financialization, and representation – that have become tightly interwoven into the fabric of our daily lives. Alternative modes of representation and categorization can open up an opportunity for relationality outside fixed institutions, beyond binaries, and across otherworldly collective imaginaries. If the supernatural exists with us in real time and space, then is it not natural? Is it then, not also contaminated by capital? And is capital not a form of black magic? Lara Saab. |
Lara Saab is a researcher and storyteller currently completing an MFA in Social Documentation at UCSC, California. Their work explores methodologies of making and documenting across multiple temporalities, mediums, and geographies. Saab was the Program Coordinator of the Home Workspace Program (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, from 2015-2020.
Melissa Ghazale is a visual artist based in Beirut. Her practice stretches from video art, installations to curatorial work. In her work, she employs intimacy as a medium and foundation for personal and collaborative archiving, rooted in the intersection between memory and technology. She obtained her M.A. in Visual Arts at ALBA in 2017, and a post-grad certificate in Arts Management at ESA in 2019.