Creation, 2026
The Language of Loss: A Lexicon of the Untranslatable explores translation as an embodied act of tension and invention. Through voice, image, sound and movement, the project stages language as a living, unstable matter, charged with politics, personal and collective intimate experience. It probes how meaning, shaped by colonialism and heritage, fractures and transforms as it crosses cultures and histories.
Shatr’s The Language of Loss: A Lexicon of the Untranslatable is part of بِأنفاسِنا نَستَمر Through Breath We Continue: a cooperation project between the Lips Festival and the Beirut Art Center for the co-production and support of interdisciplinary projects. Awarded the Mediterranean Season 2026 label, this initiative provides for the selection of three performances during production, a residency period, support, and a public presentation at the Lips #3 Festival— Breath. Co-curated by Elena Biserna, Ibrahim Bala and Nour Sokhon, this project emerges from a common interest in breath and voice as platforms of life, relationship and interdependence. In a context crossed by ecological, political and economic crises, it reaffirms the desire and the material and symbolic right to breathe and speak – to exist. The selected artists, Dayna Ash, Shatr (Sarah Huneidi, Theresa Sahyoun and Nadine Makarem) and Nour Sokhon, propose narratives anchored in the present, but open to imaginaries of reconstruction, reparation and justice. Faced with a present polluted and made suffocating by massive destruction, they claim air and audibility as common goods, both biological and political, environmental and social. Between poetry, spoken word, images and music, their projects make speaking and performance a space of care and collective breathing.
As part of the 2026 Mediterranean Season and the Aix Biennale, in partnership with the Beirut Art Center
Co-production: LABgamerz in cooperation with the Beirut Art Center
Curator: Elena Biserna (LABgamerz), Ibrahim Nehmé (Beirut Art Center) and Nour Sokhon
With the support of the French Institute of Lebanon
