My research considers the ways in which artistic works represent and respond to the after-effects of unrest in places defined by sociopolitical urgencies and resistance movements. It explores the ways contemporary artists from the MENA have visualized conflict and protest to connect viewers to the lived experiences of political and economic crisis in a post crisis-society. This paper examines the experimental artworks of Bassem Saad and Jessika Khazrik, two Lebanese artists whose research takes up critical issues from the waste crisis in Lebanon to pressing concerns about impending ecological disaster. The paper analyzes artwork that focuses on environmental sustenance and struggles on land through the lens of colonialism and brutality against marginalized groups. Speculating about the inherently diasporic nature of materials, my research situates land as an ever-shifting concept and challenges the ongoing crisis of occupation. It explores how artists utilize fiction, play, and speculation in their works to reconceptualize instances and prolonged states of conflict as not only about social chaos, but also about social reproduction and invention. Saad and Khazrik consider how notions of place and belonging are spatiotemporally destabilized through radical survival strategies that rethink catastrophes by reimagining place through improvisational and communal practices, and offer generative knowledges through interventions and mutual alliances. Their works reimagine linear notions of time to conceive of a future not-yet-determined, one that starts to envision the human and non-human coexisting.  Additionally, my research takes up feminist-decolonial thinkers to explore the notion of crisis through a trans-national perspective that highlights the intersections of differing localities. I aim to bring current discourses from film theory, visual studies, archival theory, and gender studies to artistic contexts, while working closely with artists to rethink how knowledge is articulated and reimagined. While my work aligns with critical practitioners who explore how place-making is implicated in the physical and epistemic violence of war and conflict, settler-colonialism, and border control, it approaches these issues through a uniquely intersectional lens. I also delve into ecofeminist histories and queer histories emphasizing utopian world making and not-just-human corporealities—all to emphasize a provocative constellation of queer-feminist artmaking with an activist bent. Azoulay, Ariella. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London and New York: Verso, 2019. Barad, Karen. “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable.” New Formations, no. 92 (2017): 56-86. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Naeff, Judith. Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut: A City’s Suspended Now. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.