The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) is pleased to announce the 11 projects selected to receive support under the Creative Labs pillar of the Ecologies of Culture program. The selection was made by an independent jury from more than 141 applications received across Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, and Tunisia.
Bringing together artists, cultural practitioners, researchers, technologists, educators, and scientists, the selected projects reflect a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches grounded in experimentation, inquiry, and collaboration. They explore how artistic practice intersects with other fields of knowledge to open new ways of understanding and responding to the pressing challenges shaping our world today.
The Creative Labs pillar supports projects that move beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries, encouraging new forms of co-creation between the arts and other sectors such as science, environmental studies, and social research.
The selection was made by an interdisciplinary jury whose collective expertise reflects the very ethos of Creative Labs; spanning design, technology, architecture, cultural policy, and curatorial practice. The jury members include Haytham Nawar, associate professor of design at the American University in Cairo and director of Diriyah Art Futures in KSA; Joelle Deeb, architect and researcher working at the intersection of water systems, cultural heritage, and urban studies; Chiraz Latiri, professor of computer science at the University of La Manouba and former Minister of Cultural Affairs in Tunisia; Vrouyr Joubanian, director of the Center for Collaborative Design (CIRCL) and specialist in human-centered design and innovation; and Yazid Anani, curator and academic with a longstanding practice in interdisciplinary cultural programming in Palestine.
Together, the jury brought forward projects that not only demonstrate artistic and conceptual diligence, but also reflect a strong commitment to cross-sector collaboration and locally grounded experimentation.
The 11 selected projects come from Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Tunisia. They engage with themes including ecological transformation, material knowledge, digital experimentation, collective memory, immersive storytelling, and the preservation and reimagining of cultural heritage. Rooted in local realities, they speak to broader global questions through diverse artistic and cultural practices. Together, they point to the potential of cross-sector collaboration as a driver of more connected, responsive, and imaginative cultural ecosystems.
Implemented over a period of up to 24 months, the selected projects will each receive financial support of up to EUR 65,000, in addition to a tailored package of capacity-building, technical mentorship, peer exchange, and participatory learning opportunities designed to strengthen both process and impact.
Creative Labs is one of the three pillars of Ecologies of Culture, AFAC’s four-year regional program implemented in partnership with Oxfam, Megaphone, and Echos Electrik and co-funded by the European Union. Through its three components, Creative Placemaking, Creative Labs, and Creative Caravans, the program supports artistic and cultural initiatives that respond to interconnected global and local challenges through rooted, collaborative, and forward-looking cultural practice.
AFAC warmly congratulates all selected grantees and looks forward to accompanying these projects as they take shape over the coming period.
The selected projects
- Music in Motion (MiM), Lebanon
- The Unsolicited Commission for Atlas Valley Planning (UCAVAP), Morocco
- Material Liberatory, Palestine
- Kullu Mlih, Jordan/ Egypt/ Morocco
- Immersive Multimedia Lab, Egypt
- Nagham, Syria
- Layers of Cairo, Egypt
- The Solar Grid: Video Game, Egypt
- The Acoustic Reef, Jordan
- INTER Lab, Tunisia
- Eco-Cultures Research Unit (E.C.R.U), Lebanon
Jury Statement
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“For the Creative Labs pillar under the Ecologies of Culture program, the jury convened with a field of proposals that, in their breadth and ambition, reflect the complexity of contemporary cultural practice across the Arab region. What follows is a reading, offered in the spirit of collective inquiry.
The jury noted a pronounced geographical concentration of applications from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, with less representation from North Africa and the Arab region. This uneven distribution points to broader structural disparities in access and visibility across the region.
The proposals revealed recurring themes including environmental issues, women's rights, social justice, urban transformation, and land-based practices as overlapping and entangled fields. Many projects engaged with archives and documentation as forms of counter-knowledge, responding to geopolitical fragility, erasure, and conditions of autocratic rule that continue to shape the region. The tension between local practice and global structures remained a productive negotiation throughout, with projects sustaining their specificity without retreating from broader critical engagement.
Co-creation was a central priority in this call, and the selected projects stand out in how seriously they engage with it as a mode of working, proposing processes where artistic, scientific, and community-based practices actively unsettle one another to produce forms of thinking and practice that could not emerge otherwise. Across the selected projects, technology is used in ways that are integral to the work, sometimes defining the medium itself as in motion-driven music systems or game-based storytelling, and at other times functioning as enabling infrastructure that supports access, documentation, or participation.
Three of the selected projects engage with archives through distinct and innovative approaches: a decentralized material archive rooted in Palestinian land-based practices, where documentation functions as a living pedagogical process; a Red Sea soundscape project that transforms ecological listening into cultural and political knowledge through processes of recording, analysis, and sonification; and a digital platform for Arab maqamat that builds a dataset and proposes new AI-based models for learning and engaging with Arabic musical systems. In each case, the archive is not static, but activated as a site of transmission and experimentation.
Two projects engage with technology as the structural condition of the work itself: a sensor-equipped wearable instrument that translates movement and dance into music through real time interaction and generative AI, introducing a new performance medium; and a narrative video game that constructs a speculative, interactive world where storytelling unfolds through player agency, embedding ecological and political questions within gameplay. Here, innovation lies in the creation of new artistic forms that depend on technological systems to exist.
Two projects address urban transformation through participatory and immersive approaches: an interactive platform layering Cairo's invisible social history onto a map through community testimony and digital cartography; and a VR-based lab translating women's memories into immersive spatial experiences. Both projects reconfigure how cities are documented and experienced, shifting from top-down representations to distributed, embodied, and participatory modes of knowledge production,
Three projects are grounded in land, water, and ecology as deeply political terrains. One investigates salinity as both ecological indicator and cultural condition across Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan, combining citizen science, AI-enabled mapping, and artistic practice to imagine climate adaptation rooted in local knowledge. Another develops a transdisciplinary laboratory in southern Tunisia rooted in local materials and ancestral knowledge, rethinking how experimental cultural production can emerge from within context rather than being imported. A third uses speculative design and fiction to reimagine Morocco’s Ait Bougmez valley, combining ecological research, architectural thinking, and community knowledge to propose alternative futures.
These projects emerge from a region in profound upheaval. What they share is a refusal to be merely reactive. Each proposes a form of cultural and intellectual sovereignty, positioning research, artistic practice, and experimentation as tools for shaping, not just reflecting, reality. Collectively, they demonstrate how contemporary cultural practice in the Arab region can generate new forms of knowledge, new artistic languages, and new ways of engaging with the social, ecological, and technological challenges of our time.”