ORIENTierungsplan
Erkan Affan
Radio / Podcast
in collaboration with Cashmere Radio
Episode #3: On Self-Orientalism and Decolonising Design – in conversation with Imad Gebrayel.
Tune in on Friday, 30th October, 4pm on
cashmereradio.com and UKW 88.4 in Berlin, 90.7 Potsdam
Imad Gebrayel will be discussing self-Orientalism in Arab* Design, design education between Lebanon, The Netherlands and Germany and the need to decolonize representation across all knowledge-production disciplines. Imad will also elaborate on means of reclaiming intersectional identifications in migrant contexts, his work with different communities in Berlin and his field research on Sonnenallee as a space for negotiating Arab-Muslim identifications, part of his PhD at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin.
*A fictional construct
Text by Erkan Affan
ABOUT
ORIENTierungsplan
...is a series of discussions that decentre Euro-American productions of knowledge as the norm of focus, instead opting to spotlight voices from a region regularly finding itself at the periphery of conversation: West Asia and North Africa (or MENA). Curated and chaired by Erkan Affan, ORIENTierungsplan is a monthly discussion in which activists, artists and researchers living in Berlin will be invited to speak on a field in which they organize, create and work; subverting Western discursive supremacy and instead focusing on alternative productions, analyses and pedagogies of #KNOWLEDGE.
The population of countries and societies belonging to the predominant Western world and culture has been summarized under the acronym WEIRD - “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic”—however, the members of these WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations in the world in terms of numbers.
With its exploration called #KNOWLEDGES, the COLLECTIVE PRACTICES program puts its focus on practices that question and turn WEIRD paradigms upside down, break up and recombine them, bring together different cultural approaches to knowledge generation, and address questions such as (among others) how to critically question established hegemonic Western methods (primarily visual and discursively defined) and processes of knowledge production.
Over the course of several months, this series examines “collective practice” as it relates to artistic creation, cultural organizing and social coexistence. Together with all participating players, we, a team of cultural producers, look forward to researching, discussing, understanding and practicing collectivity across four thematic explorations (#NARRATIVES / #KNOWLEDGES / #CARE / #RESISTANCE). More info at: www.collectivepractices.net
Since 2014 the initiative ACUD MACHT NEU operates three spaces at Kunsthaus ACUD. The aim is to offer room for discourse, exchange and experimental artistic formats. Further projects of Acud Macht Neu are: the artist development program Amplify and the discussion series Kapsel about science fiction literature from China.
Text by Collective Practices
© exhoax
Imad Gebrayel
... is a creative director and researcher specializing in identity representation and bilingual visual communication. He has produced visual and theoretical works around self-Orientalism in Arab design, subjective mapping and archiving. He also collaborated with several journalistic platforms, exploring common grounds between design and media outlets across Europe. These platforms include ACE, Verspers and currently Global Ground media, a newsroom running on CIVIL.
Through engaged design practices and cross-cultural experiences, Imad aims to actively participate in a healthier dialogue between cultures and markets, one that avoids stereotyping and cultural appropriation for better business-to-consumer relationships and fairer representation in design and communication disciplines.
After years of experience as creative director of Mojo Ink – a creative studio based in the UAE with public and private sector clients from across the Middle East – he moved to the Netherlands to complete a Master’s degree in Graphic Design. He is currently undertaking ethnographic research on the negotiations of Arab-Muslim postcolonial identifications in the context of Sonnenallee, part of his PhD at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin.
https://www.instagram.com/imadgebrayel/
https://www.instagram.com/queerarabbarty/
Subjective Mapping: London B, Imad Gebrayel
Subjective Mapping: London A, Imad-Gebrayel
Imad Gebrayel
