On October 25th, 2017, a Saudi woman named Amna, who was abused by her father and male guardian, posted a call pleading for help in two videos, one in Arabic and one in English, onto her YouTube channel. On the same day, Sophia the robot came to the Saudi public sphere through a YouTube video broadcast by the Future Investment Initiative, a conference that brings together companies and international investors to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in which we learn that she is given Saudi citizenship. By giving Sophia Saudi citizenship at the “Davos in the Desert” event, the Saudi state seeks global citizenship with the world, straddling a self-orientalist identity with futuristic grandeur. Like the simulated city of Disneyland as exemplified by Jean Baudrillard, the stage where Sophia announced her citizenship (and the room in which Amna recorded her plea) subject the surrounding spaces of Riyadh and its desert outskirts to the hyperreal order of simulation. This paper will interrogate Amna’s plea, “I am real, and I am here,” in the context of what it means for both Amna and Sophia. What is “reality,” “existence,” and “citizenship” for these two mediated subjects in the posthuman and highly globalized world? By pitting Sophia against Amna as a media intervention, I will illustrate how such interplay between the two storytellers unravels both the coexistence and conflict between them as subjects and within their worlds. The heteroglossia between Amna and Sophia highlights difference through the irony of sameness, culminating in a Bakhtinian “hybrid utterance,” which serves the “dialogical imagination” of the author and recipients of this media. I situate these two gendered bodies, faces, cyborgs, and supposed citizens of the same nation in one frame, generating from their differentiated speech a polyphonic tension as an interspersed source of agency and solidarity. The ambivalence between the two subjects opens up a “third space” for textual resistance to the hegemonic state, in which the mimicry of the new Saudi national female spectacle, Sophia, is subject to mockery, while Amna’s performative nationhood is on display, challenging the state’s narrative. In the interstitial space and structured silences between signs, the potential traces of meanings and intersection of gazes extend questions of presence and immanence for Amna and Sophia and the overlapping contexts from which they emerge. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Can we imagine a future for queerness in the Middle East despite a religious fundamentalism that endorses oppressive homophobia? Can we conceive queerness outside the universalist progressivism of international LGBT rights groups? I will present a video project, On the Natural, that maps out and visualizes spaces of queer "utopia" in Tripoli, Lebanon, beyond the usual dichotomy: the oppressive, homophobic Middle East versus the emancipating, gay-defending West. As a film practitioner and scholar, I explore visual possibilities of locating queerness outside a film tradition that either celebrates a romanticized orientalist depiction of homosociality and homoeroticism in the Arab region or represents homosexuals as oppressed victims of conservative societies. Considering queerness beyond the confines of sexuality, I draw in my paper on the writings of queer theorists like Jack Halberstam, by engaging with queerness as an all-encompassing notion of life that espouses unorthodox conceptions of space and time, and like José Esteban Muñoz, by positioning queerness in a utopian, "not-yet-here" futurity. I use the work of scholar Sara Ahmed on queer phenomenology to conceive an alternate audio-visual navigation and re-orientation for queer bodies. I focus on spaces like the central public garden where the idea of productive and reproductive time is suspended and where pre-colonial homo-erotic affects are activated. I rely on concepts advanced by postcolonial scholars, like Homi Bhabha, to ponder the subversive potential of such a space as a spatiotemporal site of "slippage" into "uncertain interstices, areas of ambivalence and spaces of unresolved contradictions," where notions of masculinity, patriarchy and heteronormativity can be destabilized outside the framework of western ideals of individual freedom and liberation. In Tripoli, the homophobic and homoerotic seem to clash and intermingle. It is a city rife with an ambivalence felt at a bodily, visceral level as a space that holds both the promise of pleasure and the risk of violence. My intervention lies in furthering the search for visual representations of Arab queer subjectivities and corporealities as they continue to morph in a changing region and world. My work ultimately aims at positioning the question of queerness in the Arab region within a socio-political and historical context that engages with debates about western imperialism, neocapitalism, and religious orthodoxy. It is a proposition to engage with the future of Arab queerness as a new mode of desiring that allows us, as Muñoz writes, "to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present."

The “garbage crisis” is not a calamity that struck Lebanon suddenly. It’s rather a legacy of the civil war (1975–90) and, as the referent suggests, one of several infrastructural ‘crises’ that originated with the postwar neoliberal governance. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the privatization of waste management in 1994 benefitted real estate, facilitating coastal land grabs and the destruction of local ecologies and histories of sustenance. This is Marwa Arsanios’ contextual engagement in her interdisciplinary artistic and research project Falling Is Not Collapsing, Falling is Extending (2017). It begins from a personal story and its connection to a larger historical event—the civil war—evoking hauntological affects and excavating material histories binding waste (management) and real-estate (infrastructure). Exhibited at Beirut Art Center in 2017, her project includes a 20-minute video projection, a series of botanical drawings from various dumpsites that hang on the walls of the exhibition space, and a constellation of topographic models mapping different landfills on the exhibition floor. The artist produces a politically valent multispecies ethnography, following waste to and from a dual perspective. The first is from up close, to convey an intimate portrayal of the dumpsite—the realm of waste and rubble, flora and insects, wind and water. The second is from a distance, to reveal the process of landfilling—“the burial of the sea,” as it’s said colloquially—and the appearance of a seemingly decontextualized operational landscape, infrastructure for real-estate. In a subversive gesture, her botanical drawings and topographic models appropriate botany and mapping, imperial technologies of seeing, to make capitalism’s socio-ecological destruction visible and knowable through them across scales. The political valence of this project, I argue lies precisely with its trans-scalar aesthetic—it insists on the necessity to relate precarious social-ecologies to political-economic forces and social-economic factors, and confronts the viewer with the urgency of committing to an ecological ethics. Drawings of resilient weeds evoke a sentimental response and a temporal return to the time of flowers, a confrontation with the question: what will it take to keep these botanical drawings from becoming post-mortem photographs? Abu-Rish, Ziad. 2005. “Garbage Politics.” Middle East Research and Information Project 45. http://www.merip.org/mer/mer277/garbage-politics. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, ed. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

How does unearthing soil, sediments, remnants, and buried life-forms open up space for concealed voices and histories, and reveal interconnected systems of power and violence on people and place? As part of a larger research-based curatorial project, my work considers artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, and question narratives of socioecological crisis that contribute to the displacement and erasure of people and collective formations. The research aims to think with the land—materially and relationally—in order to unpack and historicize notions of contamination and waste as they relate to the politics of access and the violence of land allotment. For this paper, I will discuss these considerations through the practice of Palestinian artistic duo, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Their long-term investigation, "And yet my mask is powerful," confronts the apocalyptic imaginary and violence that dominates our contemporary moment. It asks what happens to people, place, and things when a living fabric is destroyed. The multi-media project uses the trips taken by young Palestinians to the sites of their destroyed villages inside Israel, as an avatar for rethinking the site of the wreckage. The ruin becomes the very material from which to trace the faint contours of another possible time. Besides, by looking at environmentalism through the lens of race, class, and gender, my paper will further explore how the materiality of land permeates our identities and representational structures, and simultaneously molds the body. My research will consider these issues through the writings of decolonial scholars who have exposed the way in which land—its use and its visuality—is tied to marginalized groups. This includes theorist Karen Barad, who considers queer ecology by rethinking distinctions between humans and less-than-humans, as well as the past and the future, which enables us a different take on questions of land use. It also includes philosopher Jane Bennett’s work on vibrant matter, which reflects on the vitality of materiality in relation to the world of humans, non-human life, and things. Additionally, it will examine philosopher Édouard Glissant’s writings on opacity, to further analyze how landscapes reveals buried histories and colonial pasts through their fissures. Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Kvinder, Køn og forskning/ Women, Gender and Research. Copenhagen, 2012, No. 1-2. Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997.