The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) is pleased to announce the 23 projects to receive support under the Creative Placemaking pillar of Ecologies of Culture, selected from over 200 applications received from across Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, and Tunisia.
Creative Placemaking supports projects that rethink how communities relate to the spaces they inhabit, whether physical or digital, and how artistic and cultural practice can help respond to urgent challenges shaping everyday life, from climate change and social inequality to memory, belonging, and collective futures.
The selection was made by an independent jury comprising Benji Boyadgian, a Palestinian artist whose work engages landscape, memory, and spatial transformation; Rana El Nemr, an Egyptian visual artist and co-founder of Cairo’s Contemporary Image Collective whose practice explores urban life, place, and public space; and Salma Kossemtini, a Tunisian curator and cultural practitioner with experience in contemporary art and heritage-based public programming; Mohamad Hafeda, a Lebanese artist, writer, and academic whose work explores spatial justice through community engagement and participatory art and architecture; and Mohamed Sleiman Labat, a Sahrawi multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer who runs Motif Art Studio, a small art space built entirely from discarded materials following destructive floods that hit the Sahrawi refugee camps in 2015.
Projects awarded by the jury include a wide range of formats and approaches, from public art, archives, and heritage rehabilitation to community workshops, research-based artistic interventions, and site-responsive cultural programming. Together, they demonstrate the power of culture to activate shared spaces, revive overlooked histories, and create new forms of gathering, participation, and local imagination.
The 23 grantees represent a mix of institutions, collectives, teams, and individual practitioners, each bringing a strong connection to their communities and a commitment to participatory, locally grounded cultural work.
Through this pillar, selected grantees will receive financial support of up to EUR 35,000, in addition to a tailored capacity-building program that includes mentorship, peer exchange, in-person workshops, and learning opportunities around cultural management, digital tools, gender equality, and climate justice.
At the conclusion of the selection process, the jury committee issued a statement summarizing their observations on the submitted projects in general and the selected projects in particular:
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“The Arab World is going through tremendous political upheaval, as imperial ambitions are yet again sowing chaos in the region. Our jury met remotely, each of us bearing witness to the turmoil in our own ways. The political shifts are embedded in the applications we viewed and in the lens through which we approached our task; decades of wars, fratricides, ethnic cleansings, and genocide, resulting in profound social, political, and environmental transformations. In such a context, the very idea of return, to land, home, or a previous situation or political order, becomes increasingly difficult to imagine. It is within this fragile moment that we find ourselves questioning the meaning of place-making. What does it mean to make place when place itself has been obliterated? This moment requires us to rethink how we define place, communities, and the relations that constitute them. What role, then, can cultural practices play in envisioning alternatives? How might they imagine relationships to place that resist erasure, and cultivate reciprocities and solidarities, past, present, and future, within our diverse communities?
A significant number of projects foregrounded archival practices, traditional knowledge, cartography, community engagement, and educational frameworks in response to the question of place-making. The applications frequently addressed the loss of heritage and identity, war and displacement, the marginalization of communities, and the climate crisis, issues that reflect the social, political, and environmental challenges we face today. It was heartening to read proposals that demonstrate knowledge, stamina, and organization, each mobilizing different tools to engage with the past, present, and future in light of shifting political realities. Many projects acknowledge the pitfalls and contradictions inherent in navigating the world we inhabit today. Artists and cultural workers from across the Arab world raised urgent questions around land, bodies, and belonging, particularly as territories are reshaped and extended through displacement and the movement of communities. We found ourselves evaluating projects that imagine futures of reconstruction for places that, by the time the jury convened, were already undergoing new waves of destruction, rendering certain proposals, and places, almost immediately part of the past. These projects become acts of defiance, securing a place for these sites in the future. Artists continue to follow their communities as they move, carrying place with them, offering possibilities of the ever-shifting ground that holds us.
No single criterion could determine the relevance or value of the applications, as the conditions and issues they address vary widely across the centers, peripheries and geographies of the region. The criterias’ significance lies across multiple registers: social engagement, intellectual rigor, experimentation, ethical considerations and the possibilities they open for future forms of relations. Guided by the overarching theme of place and ecology, we naturally gravitated towards proposals that respond to their social, political and cultural contexts. Projects that emphasize collaboration, shared knowledge and resources reflected our common understanding of placemaking as a jury.”
As the first cohort under Ecologies of Culture, these projects offer an early glimpse into the kinds of artistic and cultural practices the program seeks to support over the next four years: work that is deeply rooted, collaborative in spirit, and responsive to the interconnected realities shaping our region.
Ecologies of Culture is a four-year program led by AFAC, in partnership with Oxfam, Megaphone, and Echos Electrik, and co-funded by the European Union. The program supports cultural and artistic initiatives across nine countries through three interconnected pillars: Creative Placemaking, Creative Labs, and Creative Caravans.
We congratulate all those who received support, and extend appreciation to those who submitted their projects.
The Creative Placemaking projects selected by the jurors
- Don't Ask the Trees About Their Names by Dar Jacir for Art and Research, Palestine
- Aston Villa Forever by Mobdi'un Creative Youth / El Warcha, Tunisia
- Yarmouk Cultural Complex, Gaza City: Urban Open Room by Architects for Gaza, Palestine
- Embassy of the Day in the Night by Institute for Critical Thought, Jordan
- Residency in my Tent by General Union of Cultural Centers / Shababeek, Palestine
- From the Forest by Horshna, Lebanon
- Naqab by Lobna Sana and Laila Sana, Palestine
- Cine-Village - Towards Minya Short Film Week (Villages First) by Megraya for Training and Arts Development, Egypt
- Burullus: Maps of Memory and Sounds of Nature - Towards a Local Cultural Ecology by Saker Elnour, Yasmine Hafez, Ahmed Moursy, Amal Gamal, Kareem Hisham and Ahmed Eladawy, Egypt
- Segments for Return by Aya Abdallah and Sabine Saba, Lebanon
- Quartier-mère by Nadia Cherif, Tunisia
- Qbl ma nghib (Before I Fade) by Sayad Abderrahmane, Morocco
- BAC Radio by Beirut Art Center, Lebanon
- Medina Archive by Kimiā Collective, Morocco
- Beit Farah by Hayy; The Landing of the Space-Carpet in Chammis (Sun Land) by Hayy, Lebanon
- Body Valley Chain by Ahlam El Dirani, Mihad Haydar and Zahraa Dirany, Lebanon
- Eco Festival by Nada Rezq and Youssef Ramez Boktor, Egypt
- Irth Al-Quseir by Osama Ibrahim, Radwa Abuelhassan Abdo Hamed, Shorouk Shaaban Eid Hamdan, and Mohamed Abdelhamid Abdelrahman Mahmoud, Egypt
- The Fig Gardens by At Ebla House of Arts and Culture, Syria
- Les Gardiens de l'Eau - Avec Ushen le Fennec by Fatima Zahra Mokhtari and Leila Sghir, Morocco
- Tajmâat: Reimagining How We Inhabit the Earth by rhizome, Algeria
- Kartoon and Arts by Kartoon Theater_ Hanin Theater Troupe, Syria
- In Search for Justice Among the Rubble by Public Works, Lebanon