Within and Without: How to Create Within a Machine Without Becoming One

This three-part writing workshop series explores how artists can resist capture, negotiate agency, and reclaim authorship within and alongside institutions. Rather than defaulting to disengagement, it asks: how might we write our way through the contradictions and toward new forms of autonomy, collectivity, and presence?

Writing as Riot

A session that examines the illusion of legacy and inherited power, and asks what collapses and what possibilities emerge when communal structures break down. Writing as riot, as release, as refusal.

Lylla Younes is an investigative journalist and writer based in Beirut. She is the managing editor of the local magazine The Public Source. Previously, she taught at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Writing Between Instinct and Intention

A session that dwells in the space between desire and planning, between what we long for and what we’re asked to produce. A return to impulse as a source of artistic truth.

Lina Mounzer is a Lebanese writer and translator. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Freeman’s, Washington Post, and The Baffler, as well as in the anthologies Tales of Two Planets (Penguin 2020), and Best American Essays 2022 (Harper Collins 2022). She is Senior Editor at the literary arts and culture magazine The Markaz Review.

Offsetting the Machine

A workshop on identifying the mechanisms that shape and accelerate the art world and how to disrupt their momentum. Tools for breaking rhythm, offsetting control, and recovering creative agency.

Nadine Mouawad is an open technology researcher concerned with surveillance and feminist tech. She mostly examines the impact of surveillance economies on our social movements, the “gigification” of activist labor, and the manipulation of the algorithms towards our creativities and imaginations. She is an advocate of open source technology not just as tools but also as practice for collaboration, safety, privacy vs the erosion of data freedoms under the AI race.

This series of workshops is curated by Celine Aljamil with guidance from Nur Turkmani, and is part of the public program for Fall for Print: Beirut Art Book Fair.

Visual by @rob_khalil and @adan.sm