Wassila Abboud

Wassila Abboud is a writer and researcher living between Amsterdam, Beirut and Sydney. With a background in journalism, her work is grounded in collaborative research and is interested in the politics of bodies, and impossibilities in language. She looks at language and the meaning of words within different social contexts between Beirut, Amsterdam and Sydney and aims to reconstruct the meaning of words in relation to their context.

She has worked with platforms and artists including KASK Curatorial Studies (Belgium), Kunsthal (Belgium) Zoukak Theatre (Beirut) Radio Al Hara (Palestine), Channel [V] (Sydney), Broadsheet (Sydney) and United Nations Association of Australia (Sydney), We Present (Amsterdam) and Salwa Foundation (Amsterdam) and has been featured in Broadsheet Publication (Sydney), Azeema Magazine (London), Channel V (Sydney), Resident Advisor (London) and literary publication Soft Stir (Sydney).

https://www.instagram.com/wassila_/

Research

Whose words do we use to capture our collective undefeated despair, the magnitude of loss and the conditions of subtle and obvious structural violence? Who’s philosophy do we seek to shape our understanding of what ‘liberation’ means, as the precondition for any truly transformative future? When we choose to transmit certain theories, what impact do they truly hold within western cultural institutions? The same institutions who themselves are in crises, perfecting a formula of calculated language that appropriates revolutionary aesthetic and disguising deeply rooted Zionist values. We observe institutional language which theorizes Arab nationalism movements, done in a way which reproduces a static temporality of enduring violence. The same voices who by doing this, obfuscate the past and colonize the future, bypassing any material present avoidant of analyzing capitalism and colonialism as one reliant and dialectic mode of production.

My research analyzes cultural production, through the lens of language and explores the neoliberal modes of production and structures of freedom of speech as a virus. One that dictates how far we can go, a virus that seeks to bypass tyrannical firewalls yet alters itself between a dominant culture and a dominated one. Reflecting the same stress, it detects the multiple structures of violence and its authenticity is tested in the confusion of recognition. This is the dilemma of the dominated. To be wiped out or to alter, at the price of their continuity.

Throughout my research, I compare different periods of time including Lebanon’s pre- pre-NGOsation of Lebanon’s cultural field, to seek answers of how love and revolution influenced cultural production and how it’s differed to now, with the arrival of AI and the many subtle and obvious institutional firewalls that exist in our cultural fields. After two historic shifts in the region, before the Oslo Accords in Palestine, and the end of the civil war in Lebanon, political movements were existing within cultural work via cultural clubs, and it’s very subject matter was politics. There was no separation between producers and the audience. To examine intelligence, love and revolution, throughout our globalised context, I revert back to our own history and center Arab philosophers and artists who’s work was centred around love, with the goal of revolutionary change. I look at Lebanese Marxist philosopher, Mahdi Amel who was not only a writer and philosopher, but spent his years writing unpublished poetry, related to love and revolution. Throughout the past six years, I’ve worked with the Mahdi Amel Center to create a digital archive of published and unpublished works via International Institute of Social History based in Amsterdam.

I approach these archives with excellence, from a place of attempting to understand the language that was used in moments of transformation and their relationship to love and revolution. Another layer to my research is my own personal relationship to Mahdi Amel, my great uncle who I never got the chance to meet but has shaped my worldview intrinsically. This means I also will approach my theoretical understanding of my subject matter with love and inseparability.