This document in front of you is the result of a conversation over lunch, which took place in the early days of Corona in Berlin. Back then, we were simply wondering: in a time in which people are, either by policy or good faith, forced to restrict their spatial radius of interaction to a bare minimum, how do we actually deal with food? Not only in the sense of what we choose to eat conceptually, but how we choose it, literally. Where do we get it, how do we prepare it, and what does something essential like food mean to ...

—What should I do? We anticipated atrocities, mayhem, chaos. All there was, was a strange stillness lingering over violence from the night before. It doesn’t matter where or when this was. There were, there are, many nights. The calmness was sincere, not eerie as one might imagine. Blood shed in peace, startles. It felt welcoming, enough to want to be there, amid anyone. We walked among people, tents, clusters of conversations, we gave out newspapers, shared news and oranges we had bought. Nine floors up, in a balcony, overlooking freedom, journalists propped their cameras for an uninterrupted airing of a live ...

I cannot remember what time of day it was that I was standing outside of Bétonsalon, a center for art and research in Paris. As I write this my memory is straining, trying to reconcile the two cities, Cairo and Paris, that I moved between that summer four years ago. What I do remember was being pensive, standing outside the art space. I was there at the invitation of Kadist Art Foundation to participate in the seminar ‘The Place from Where We Look’, to talk about art and institutions, and the places from where we practice. A few months later I ...

Qalqalah قلقلة is an editorial and curatorial platform dedicated to the production, translation and circulation of artistic, theoretical and literary research in three languages: French, Arabic and English. Founded in 2018 in France, in the midst of a political and intellectual context, and a media coverage marked by reactionary, authoritarian and discriminatory speeches and acts, Qalqalah قلقلة asserts a feminist, inclusive and intersectional stance. It relies on translation as a tool for the production and reception of situated knowledge, capable of making visible the relations of power and the possibilities of invention and affection that are at play between languages, ...

In echo of their respective programs, Kadist Art Foundation and Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research are launching the joint publication Qalqalah, a “reader” gathering contributions from artists and researchers on a variety of interlinked issues. The name Qalqalah is taken from a text by Cairo-based curator Sarah Rifky. In the text, the eponymous heroine, living in the near future, gradually loses her memory in a world where notions of language, art and economy have quietly collapsed. In this world of reconstituted, fluid knowledge, which inspires a mixture of hope and fear, the meaning of the Arabic name Qalqalah ...

The contributions to this second issue of Qalqalah were born from encounters and discussions held during seminars we recently organized or were invited to attend. Collecting Matters: The Place from Where We Look, organized in June 2015 in Paris by Kadist Art Foundation, examined collecting strategies, the re-writing of art history and the reconfiguration of artistic practices in the age of globalization. Bringing together six young international professionals, curators and researchers, the discussions focused on the notion of locality. If “the place from where we look” is socially, ideologically and culturally conditioned by a given society, what view should we ...