Tamass Contemporary Arab Representations

Tamass--which means contact, touch, contiguity, adjacency, tangency, and confrontation line(s)--is part of Catherine David's long-term project Contemporary Arab Representations. The project comprises seminars, performances, publications, and presentations of works by different authors--visual artists, architects, writers, and poets--with the aim of encouraging productions, interaction, and exchange between the different cultural centers of the Arab world and the rest of the world. Tamass 1 focuses on Beirut and Lebanon; Tamass 2 on Cairo. Both are devoted to the development and promotion of an experimental, critical, contemporary Arab culture. Participants propose representations that can broach the reality of the city and the present conditions of its society.