Listening to "Moving Through Water" by Tricky and Marta is like being in a liminal space, a place where grief is not presented as loud or bold but ebbs and flows quietly underneath. This multi-faceted and haunting soundscape provides the experience of carrying the ambiguity of the loss, a loss that some do not see on the surface yet underlies my inner world. It embodies my slow way of moving through collective grief and my personal grief, as grief wends its way through memory, identity, and silence but does not seek any 'answer', only acknowledgment. After all, the song does not offer answers, only a space to rest under weight. It also reminds me of my own project “Voices Beneath the Surface” and both dwell in the emotional undercurrents we often suppress. As an artist, I strive to make visible what is invisible, hidden grief that is personal, political, and intergenerational, and allow it to breathe through visual and participatory work. This song is not only grief, but it holds grief, therefore speaking to the very nature of my artistic practice.

“We do not see ‘pieces,’ ‘sculptures,’ ‘drawings,’ ‘paintings,’ ‘frames,’ or ‘pedestals,’ none of these... but a breathing or a circulation of things placed here and there.” 

I have two interpretations for this:

1) I believe that “physical” things or bodies or entities are not solid and put altogether. They are a result of years and years, generations and generations of common conscious (and unconscious) effort to assemble in the mind such an object like a drawing or sculpture. An interpretation based on Mental Construct Realism where true solidity do not exist, it is only perceptual and shaped by various mental models that intertwined through different societies, collectively.

2) Another interpretation would be that whatever comes into our visual field is seen based on our own experiences and understanding of things and ideas and concepts. Two people looking at the same painting might interpret it in different ways. It is the material of the thing being looked at that is mostly seen, but how it is moving and why it is moving this way that connects directly to the viewer’s unconscious: a fusion filtered through a person’s past experiences, memories, and emotional resonances

MY CURRENT CIRCULATION

INPUTS

• Rage as response to exclusion

PROCESSING

• Visual storytelling (video art, installation, participatory art)

OUTPUTS

• Art that listens and speaks back

FEEDBACK LOOP

• Participants (youth, women, students) respond
• I adjust, reframe, listen again

By Yara El Turk


My voice is not an echo.
It is not a softened version of someone else's truth,
nor a translation of power into acceptable silence.
It is born from the place where languages are brained.
Arabic, French, English
where breath is broken,
but I still want to make sound.
My voice wants to say:
We are not what the world reduces us to.
I come from a crisis-ridden region,
but I do not carry war - I carry wisdom.
I do not speak only from trauma -
I speak from the heartbeat of survival,
of communities that create despite lack, 
that love despite fragmentation.
My voice is telling me:
Justice is not abstract,
it is the price of a bus ride
for a student who walks to class for hours.
It is the silence of a woman
who had their ideas taken of them and named.
It is the artist that is not paid
to be applauded.
My voice is telling me:
That we deserve joy
without having to pay for it through suffering.
That we deserve to create,
not only as resistance
but as remembrance,
as renewal,
as release.
My voice is not waiting to be found.
It is not soft.
It is not delicate.
It already exists
in my art, my projects, and my identity.

And if the world does not listen,
I will still speak.
And I will build a new world.

By Yara El Turk


I'm birthing despair
in the same hand that plants seeds.
It isn't healed, but it is held.

Down south of me
were memory clings like rubble,
and names die on newsfeeds
I feel heavy with what can't be saved.
Pope L. tells me:
some wounds are for performance.
Some institutions bleed silence.

And still
I whisper to the girl in me who wanted out, Gwendolyn Brooks:
Live not for legacy, but for light.
Not the spotlight
The candle passed hand to hand
in a dark room.

I carry hope
in the broken bowl of language.
It leaks but still
holds enough to offer.

And maybe that is art:
not escape
but evidence
that we were here,
we named the grief,
we wrote with it
not after it.

I carry both.
I make both.
And in the tension,
I find a rhythm
that sounds
like breath.

Water means moving
Not just in form, but in fact.
Every ripple we made together
Moved something hidden inside me too.

There was a time when I held structure as stone:
Definite intentions, predictable ways,
Work to do, impact to measure.
Yet in our five sessions,
I remembered how to flow.

Art used to be an expression
Now it is a kind of translation.
Of silence into shape,
Of pain into light.
The boundaries between my practice and my purpose
Have dissolved.

I am more than a facilitator
More than a coordinator, or peace ambassador - 
I am a channel; 
Pouring, receiving, becoming.

The feelings stirred - closeness, tension, resonance - 
Pounded against the walls, I didn't know I had erected.
I leave with more questions, 
And with questions, brings courage.

Something profound has shifted. 
Not boisterously, 
More like water meandering 
Newly through the structure of my life.