PhD Candidate in Digital Creativity (Augmented Museology & Decolonial Narratives) | Historian | Filmmaker & XR Developer | Cultural Worker & Community Builder
Treasures grow richer when shared. Whenever possible, I will put my archives, references, and work available online.
Based in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal), I was born in Qatar to SyroLebanese parents, raised between Beirut and Montreal, and from university onwards between Paris and Beirut with a few years dispatched in Alexandria, Istanbul, Tourcoing, and Cannes.
2006: Upon receiving my Diplôme d’Études Approfondies in Political Science, my director Elizabeth Picard summoned me: “I’m giving you one year to decide whether to pursue a PhD or not.” My answer: a PhD, yes. But after turning 40, I want to make films from my research. I didn’t know that a field had just been born in academia: research-creation.
2010: Graduated with unanimous honors from le Fresnoy – National Studio for Contemporary Arts in France – an institution steeped in technology – I begin my first feature film. The context is favorable: Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, in full boom, support artists of my generation. Yet with the Arab revolutions in 2011, I sense the project becoming dissonant. How do you make a film about Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804-1887), a 19th-century intellectual, however brilliant, avant-garde, and transnational he may be? Like Godard in May ’68, I wonder how to calculate camera shots when dictatorships are falling? And if art must transcend the specific toward the universal, how do you marry history, audience, and artistic expression? These are questions at the foundation of my practice, yet THE Shidyaq project, germinating since my masters in History in 2001, struggles to emerge.
2015: Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) launches its emergency missions in the Mediterranean to rescue refugees. I embark as a cultural mediator, without a camera, without any intention to film. I’m a historian, and besides, how do you put images to such tragedies? Emergency missions typically last one month, for how intense they are. I stay for five. I quickly understand that humanitarian engagement is to short time what history, culture, or storytelling are to the long term: a duty of preservation for human dignity. A film imposes itself upon me.
2017, pivotal year: I complete What Happens to a Displaced Ant, the 42-minute film shot on my phone on the boats, blending animated sequences of shipwreck paintings by Courbet and Turner with MSF archives. An assertive writing style is born. The film circulates in festivals. That same year, Cannes invites me to a paired directors program: five weeks to write, shoot, and edit a short film that will open the Directors’ Fortnight. Finally, the key to Shidyaq: Jean-François Peyret, renowned author and theater director, close to Jean-Paul Sartre, falls in love with the project. Three unforgettable writing residencies together – Beirut, Paris, and Normandy. I return to Beirut with a co-written script in one hand, animation equipment purchased in Poland in the other. I prepare my first solo exhibition on Shidyaq at Galerie Tanit‘s 500m² space.
2019, year of rupture: Cannes launches its virtual and extended reality (XR) market section. Eureka: this is the solution for the film’s setting, which also takes place across five countries in the 19th century. I return to Poland to find collaborators. Everything shifts in Beirut: revolution, economic collapse, port explosion, COVID, and my mother falls ill in Montreal. As soon as airports reopen, I join her in the city of my adolescence, where I had fantasized about the digital creativity scene (who wouldn’t). I get the PRATIC scholarship and dive into the virtual reality program at Institut Grasset, a rich, intensive year, but too general. Then what? After four cities in five years, sometimes with just a suitcase, exhausted, a recurring image imposes itself: to sit in a museum and think. I become a security guard at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Standing, sometimes for eleven hours, I listen to podcasts, chat with guides and visitors, devour books. Between rounds, intuition crystallizes into a subject just as I discover the custom doctoral program at the School of Digital Animation and Design (NAD-UQAC). Providence in action. Thanks to the CORUS excellence scholarship, I embark on my PhD under the co-supervision of Yan Breuleux and Luc Courchesne. I join the Mimesis laboratory and Hexagram, the research-creation network in arts, culture, and technology. My subject? Exploring augmented museography through contested object biographies and decolonial counter-performative narratives.
And Shidyaq, then? This timeless transmitter of knowledge, polyglot, transnational citizen has been pushing me for twenty-five years to find accessible narrative strategies. Today: several conferences and immersive performances, five degrees, two published articles, ten short and medium-length films (8mm, 16mm, stop motion, mobile phone, fulldome, VR), six multidisciplinary works (robotic mixed media, installations, interactive experiences, photographic series). The goal remains the same: history for collective memory and blueprint for the future, fieldwork as solidarity for the present, music for its Dionysian effect, and animation for its distanced wit. Thematically, exile and disembodiment are omnipresent elements, love a constant direction.
