(upbeat orchestra music) (crowd chattering) - Welcome, everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(audience applaud) - Good evening, everybody.

It's beautiful outside, and it's beautiful inside.

Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My name is not Christina Hamilton.

I'm Nick Tobier.

I'm a professor here at, (cheers) thank you, and we're really pleased to host Studio Safar today.

We have Maya Moumne here in person, and Hatem Imam will be joining us up on there via ReBoot from Beirut, Lebanon.

We wanna thank our partners as today's event is in partnership with Flint Magazine and Riverbank Arts with support from the Office of Research and Economic Development and the chancellor's office at the University of Michigan, Flint and series partners, Detroit Public Television and Michigan Radio 91.7 FM.

Studio Safar have been in residence at Riverbank Arts in Flint, where earlier this month, they launched the exhibition Flint versus Safar or Flint X Safar.

I didn't mean to foment any conflict, which collects their explorations of wonder.

The exhibition is currently on display at Riverbank Arts in Flint for two more weeks.

Hope you can get up there.

As part of their residency, Studio Safar also collaboratively designed issue number three of Flint Magazine just released at the Detroit Art Book Fair.

Reminder that tomorrow, the Speaker Series hosts a virtual event live from London at Shakespeare's iconic Globe Theater where we will stream the 50th anniversary of alternative miss world renowned sculptor, Andrew Logan's celebration of transformation creativity.

The live event stream will start at 2:00 PM tomorrow, which is Friday.

The program will be available for on-demand viewing thereafter on this Penny Stamps Series website and Facebook page, pennystampsevents.org.

Today, we'll have a Q&A right here directly following the stage presentation.

So for those of you who are not staying or not joining us for the Q&A, you can leave relatively quietly out those doors and everyone else come forward.

You'll see that there are microphones up here in front of the stage.

So please, if you have a question, come on down and line up at either microphone to ask, and now to introduce our speakers properly today, please welcome Detroit based designer, filmmaker, professor of design at U of M Flint, and co-founder of Flint Magazine, super cool dude, Ben Gaydos.

(everyone applauds) - Hi, everybody.

Thank you, Nick, for that introduction, and thank you to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Lecture Series for all that they do in supporting engaging discussions around art and design.

Maia Assaq, the co-founder of Flint Magazine with me, and editor-in-chief also wanted to be here as well to welcome to this event, and while she could not make it like the excellent editor she is, she provided me with some fantastic notes.

So it is my pleasure to introduce the co-founders of Studio Safar, Maya Moumne, who is here with us in person, and Hatem Imam, who is joining us from Lebanon.

Studio Safar is a design agency founded in Beirut in 2012, evoked by its name, which translates to travel in Arabic, the studio is concerned with notions of communication across cultural and linguistic barriers.

Their work spans a variety of media, including print publications, visual identities, websites, and set and exhibition design, but not limited to that.

There are autonomous Journals Safar, which just released its seventh issue titled "Networks" was founded in 2014 and acts as a remedy to the gaps in critical writing about design in the region.

Each issue of Safar covers a breadth of subject matter from dismantling racist and colonial power structures in the US design institutions to the history of film production and distribution channels in Lebanon.

In this way, Safar draws a beautiful balance between the multitude of external factors, politics, aesthetics, cultural trends, history, et cetera that affect design.

Like Journal Safar, Ohio Magazine, which publishes literary and visual content on the work's interests and strife of women, is designed by the studio and published bilingually in Arabic and English.

This magazine, of which Maya Moumne is editor-in-chief, further exemplifies the studio's commitment to using their platform to address issues that are both personal and global and highlight the, otherwise, underrepresented voices in literary and visual media.

Their approach to design and editorial work reverberates throughout the work of the studio and into their personal practice.

They seemingly have an unending desire to found things such as Samandal, a trilingual comics magazine, and the Annyhaya record label, with which Flint Magazine just co-released a collection of work by seminal Egyptian-American composer, Halim El-Dabh.

Maya and Hatem even founded a furniture design company many moons ago.

After working closely with Studio Safar over the last few years, who now have offices, both in Canada and in Lebanon, it's clear that their impact extends beyond the art and design community.

Throughout the covid-19 pandemic, the Beirut port explosion and its subsequent handling, and the political and economic decline in Lebanon, Studio Safar played an integral role in disseminating vital information around safety, protest demonstrations, and access to resources using social media and other channels.

I've personally been inspired by the energy and level of commitment they put into calling attention to and dismantling oppressive systems in and outside of Beirut, especially when social political conditions in Lebanon continue to deteriorate.

While this introduction barely scratches the surface of the beautiful and thoughtful design work produced by studios Safar, the impact of their ideas and imagery resonates as it travels beyond barriers from hand to heart.

Please join me in welcoming Maya Moumne and Hatem Imam.

(audience applauds) - [Maya] Can everyone hear me okay?

- [Hatem Voice Over] It started with an obsession for print.

(dramatic bollywood music) Two holders, a space to collaborate, to experiment, to play, to share, to learn, to publish, to make space, to rest, to think, and to fight.

- Thank you so much for inviting us here, and thank you so much, Ben and Maia, for the lovely introduction.

I'm Maya Moumne, and on screen with us is Hatem Imam.

We are co-founders and co-creative directors of Studio Safar, and we are celebrating 10 years this month.

(audience applauds) Thank you.

We are gonna start with four words and their definitions, and the reason why we're showing these four words is for a studio that operates from an Arab region with very little access to our culture and our history.

We are finding a surge in approaching design today using cultural references, but these four words are important to keep in mind as we move forward.

The first word is fetishize.

It's to have an excessive and irrational commitment, devotion to, or obsession with something.

To romanticize is to deal with or describe in an idealized or unrealistic fashion to make something seem better or more appealing than it really is.

To exoticize is to portray someone or something unfamiliar as exotic or unusual, to romanticize or glamorize.

Pastiche is an artistic work in style, can you guys hear me?

Yeah, pastiche is an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, an artist, or a period.

Unlike with most magazine studio timelines, the design studio actually came before the magazine.

So with most magazines, they'll start, they'll produce a few issues, they'll be really successful, and then the magazine will create a design studio that will start to create branded content for companies, brands, campaigns that will either feature in the printed magazine or the online platform.

With Studio Safar, the opposite started.

So we started the studio in 2012 and then the magazine in 2014.

Studio Safar is a design agency and a publisher with offices in Beirut and, now, Montreal.

The studio adopts an experimental approach to design and evoked by its name, which as been said is Arabic for travel, Safar is concerned with notions of communication across cultural and linguistic barriers.

Most of the work we do services the extended cultural sector and is engaged in social and political discourse.

Growing up, studying, and then working and producing from Beirut, we felt like there has always been a big gap in writing about regional design and visual culture.

There were conversations and disputes to be had, as well as opinions and discoveries to be made.

(man speaking in a foreign language) (upbeat electronic music) - [Maya Voice Over] Bored by a utilitarian problem solving approach to design, we naturally steered towards the arts.

Post-war Beirut had seemed like a big laboratory of experimentation in every discipline and collaborations with musicians, thinkers, and performers defined The period before starting Studio Safar.

Conceiving the studio put us face to face with the urgent questions we had been obsessing over, identity, multilingualism, and nostalgia.

We essentially felt an urge to negotiate a relationship with a complex and chaotic baggage of visual culture, and this all started with our name.

We wanted an Arabic word, and at the time, almost all design studios in Beirut had English names.

We chose Safar, which is Arabic for travel, to convey notions of exchange and communication across physical and linguistic barriers.

American and European design history and thinking have definitely shaped our understanding of the field of design, and while we may think this is a result of globalization, a more accurate term for this is colonialism.

Hatem, do you wanna go ahead?

We might be having internet problems from Beirut, so I'll continue.

Colonialism starts with language, and it extends to all fields of cultural production from fashion to architecture and-- - [Hatem] Thanks, Maya.

- [Maya] Can you hear me okay?

I think there may be a lag.

Okay, I'll just go forward.

Colonialism starts with language, and it extends to all fields of cultural production.

- [Hatem] There's a huge lag, I suppose.

- So, as you can tell, the internet in Lebanon has been and is still very, very bad.

Hatem, I'm just gonna go ahead so that we don't have any lag.

- [Hatem] Yeah, is it better now?

Can you hear me?

- Yeah, yeah.

Actually, yeah, go ahead.

- Oh, okay.

All right, all right, thanks.

So colonialism starts basically with language, and it extends to all fields of cultural production, from fashion to architecture and, of course, to all forms of design.

We see this, of course, vividly in academia.

The books that we studied, the history of graphic design, and the history of everything of that's relative to design, what we actually learned at school was by mostly like American and European designers.

This is something that we still, I mean, as someone who's teaching graphic design now, this is something that is still predominantly the case in Lebanon but also in other programs around the region.

In Arab region, we had close to no documentation of our own visual culture with regards to printed matter and graphic design.

When we talk about the hegemony and heavy influence of American and European design history and thinking, specifically in academia, we mean the courses given and the works that are produced.

This is a double edged sword.

On one hand, there is something exciting and new about the assemblage of influences and references.

On the other hand, there is definitely a partial erasure of local conventions and representation.

We are showing here a couple of books by Egyptian writer, artist, and designer, Helim El-Dabh, who passed away, maybe, around 10 years ago or even less.

These books are very precious to us, because they are collected writings specifically about visual culture, and the name of these books is it actually came in a series of, I think, four different books, and these were collected from articles that were actually published in magazines, and they were put together in the form of a book, and these books, when we discovered them, were really some of the very rare books that tackled design and visual culture in the region in a way that is not strictly academic, but actually that is made for quite large readership and even for the big range of ages from young adults to adults.

- [Maya] This was also definitely a light bulb moment for us upon discovering this periodical, if you want.

You can see on the right side is issue one, and on the left side is issue two.

When we discovered this periodical, we were like, oh, wow, designers can write.

- So going to the absence of local institutional archives that specialize in prints and/or visual and material culture, we rely on the personal collections and archives of our friends and colleagues.

These archives could be in the form of libraries at our friends homes, but also in many cases, they could be digital archives.

They could be in the form of Instagram account, blogs, or websites like the one that we're looking at right now, Yahala Studio.

It was a friend of ours collecting their friends, particularly from Palestine, but for the very first time, actually in 2020, an academic book on the history of Arabic graphic design was published in Kaido, you see, by Haytham Nawar and Bahia Shehab.

So this is, imagine 2020, the first time that we see a book that is called The History of Arab Graphic Design.

- The book traces, also, the timeline of the practice in the region from way before it was actually coined graphic design.

So at the time, calligraphers and artists or painters used to do the work of graphic designers.

So it really traces way back to them.

- Yeah, what's quite interesting, actually, is to look at the origins of the practice.

So bookmakers, advertisers, calligraphers, sign-makers, all of these people are actually practicing what we, today, call a graphical design, but the term itself wasn't coined as such, necessarily, before, say, the nineties.

Actually, in Lebanon in 1992 was when the first graphic design bachelor's degree was given at the university level here in Beirut.

Before that, people had, as I said, so many different terms of different practices that we, today, consider within the realm or under the umbrella of graphic design.

The fact of having this lack in publishing around the topic is slowly changing.

These are just some of the books that have come out in the last 10 years.

The first one on the top left of the wall is a really important book by Zeina Maasri that talks about political posters of the Lebanese Civil War.

So it's almost traces or leads the civil war through the posters or through its printed materials.

There's another book also by Maasri, Cosmopolitan Radicalism, which talks about the visual politics in Beirut's global sixties.

The rest of the books, the four books here, are quite a series by hot books, which highlights different designers, but also bookmakers, calligraphers, and artists.

For example, Hilmi Al-Tuni, Egyptian artist painter, but also very notorious book cover illustrator, Nasri Khattar, who created a unique, detached, Arabic typeface or letter forms, Emile Mennem, who specifically specializes in design for within journalism.

So he's worked on so many important newspapers and other periodicals, Saloua Raouda Choucair, who is predominantly a sculptor and a painter, but also who's worked in tapestry and many other forms related to design as well.

- And as you can tell thus far, while this talk is very much so about our work, it will feature very little of our work, but this is all within the discourse of how the studio operates and what informs our practice and how it makes its way into our commissioned work and our published work.

(speaks in a foreign language) - [Hatem Voice Over] The first years carried equal measures of excitement and disappointment.

We were the new kids on the block, and it felt good.

Clients wanted to take risks with us, and the thrill of the new was real.

We were also sometimes stupid and aimless.

We understood the value of collective thinking and doing and forged our very own studio culture.

Some people became forever collaborators and friends, main actors in the studio's story.

We learned about things we never thought were prerequisites for running a design studio.

Work led us to the nooks of the city that collectively became our home.

We gave it our all.

(inquisitive electronic music) It was a strange and exciting time to be in Beirut right before the city's free fall.

Work, pleasure, and politics collided.

- One of our missions is to shift the attention of the design narrative from its fixation on the global north and to look inwards and backwards at history, and if we were to agree to recognize design or designers as active agents in cultural production, then how can we use the tools we have as designers to present more useful, lasting, and democratic forms of communication?

What you see in the videos is our snippets of our work, everything.

It's all sorts of different works we've done, video, art direction, animation, logo design, photo shoots, packaging, publication designs, branding, typography.

In terms of scope of work, we do everything a graphic design and art direction agency does in addition to publishing our own design and visual culture magazine.

10 years into it, we've done it all.

We've done banks.

We've done the food and beverage business.

We've done packaging for candy.

We've done publications.

We've done communication strategies.

We've designed posters, business cards, but throughout the, I mean, the later we got with the years, the more research we do, the more excitement, the more fun we'd have publishing our magazine, the more we realized, actually, one of the most important things for us as designers and possibly for you as students is to understand that to be a great designer, you should be a great writer, and to be a great writer is to have the agency to publish, whether it's work or words or other people's works and words.

I'm gonna just pause here to give everyone a little trigger warning.

There are gonna be graphic images of the Beirut blast.

So I'm just gonna give everyone a second to leave the room if it's too much or to turn away.

All good?

Okay, on August 4th, 2020, a big blast hit a part of the city that almost leveled it.

That part of the city happens to be where our studio was located and where most of us were in that moment.

We lost our studio.

The streets looked like this, and I'm going to just go through a few snippets of tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram stories that we've collected throughout the months pre and post the blast.

Before the blast happened, the country actually had started going through a really severe economic downfall.

According to the World Bank, it's one of the three most severe economic crises since the mid-19th century.

This is a tweet or a series of tweets by Zeina Shaaban, and she writes, "Lebanon has been dealing since last year "with rampant fires, brutal opposition from government "to the popular uprising, a collapsed economy in free fall, "informal capital controls on banks, "essentially meaning everyone lost their money, "more than half the country is under the line of poverty.

"exchange rates to the USD are soaring "with the minimum wage dropping from $450 to $80 a month, "covid numbers rising and putting a strain "on a very fragile healthcare system, "and now the explosion that leveled most of the city."

This is an image from the protest post the explosion.

It's somebody holding a banner.

The banner says, "My government killed my people."

There's a Facebook post here by Edwin and it reads, "Amid the unspeakable catastrophe that unfolded in Beirut, "new covid-19 cases have skyrocketed in the past few days, "and since we've been pushed to such extreme conditions "of unlivability, we're now strictly fearing contagion, "because it either means we'll be excluded for weeks "from lending out a hand to the hundreds of thousands "who've lost their homes or that we'll find ourselves "with no safe space to quarantine or even that, God forbid, "we require hospitalization, we will not be able "to find available rooms "in our destroyed medical facilities, "because torn limbs always trump shortness of breath.

"The Lebanese state and its apparatus did warn us "about a global pandemic, but they failed to inform us that, "in the meantime, it was readying itself to wipe us all out "with a nuclear blast."

This is a screenshot from an Instagram story while everyone was getting ready to protest post the blast.

It features a map, and you can see in red where the blast site happened, and right next to it is where the protest was meant to happen.

The caption reads, "Today is the real explosion.

"See you at five."

Another Facebook post by Rima Rantisi reads, "Today, the whole world is watching.

"We need a member of every single household in Lebanon "in the streets today and tomorrow and after.

"We clean the rubble.

"We raise the funds.

"We make policies.

"We save each other.

"We make the country.

"The next step is that we are the government."

This is a picture from the protest that took place.

It was massive.

It didn't last very long, because the government basically emptied it out very fast with a very severe attacks with rubber bullets and tear gas on all the protestors.

I guess why we're showing all of this is to say that design and politics go hand-in-hand, and though we've always, kind of, had that itch or had that, kind of, nook in our work, after the economic crisis and the uprising and the blast, this was, kind of, non-negotiable for us, and it was cemented after this.

As designers, we've been trained and encouraged to apply our skills and imagination to sell inessential things at best, like cigarettes, sneakers, credit cards, and recreational vehicles, but never to speak up about or tackle politics, mental health, environmental and social crises, and the list goes on.

This is the forward that was published in our fifth issue, which was published during the pandemic.

It reads, "Pandemics, policy, and economics try "to dampen the fact that we have a voice, and yes, "it will be heard."

These are screenshots taken from various media outlets elaborating or, kind of, highlighting the economic crisis in Lebanon.

Our bank accounts, I mean, all of our money was, kind of, frozen in the bank.

Nobody could access their USD account.

That is still the case until today, and any money coming in and out of the country is very hard to get ahold of, and so at some point during the pandemic when the country was closed off and there was curfew, nobody could get out of their houses, and the banks were closed, we realized that actually our bank kept withdrawing money or kept charging us for fees that we had no idea what they were, and though we tried to contact the bank several times, we got no answer, and so we thought, here's another form of publishing, right?

Publishing online is publishing.

Here's another form of publishing.

We decided to publish our statement of accounts online and highlight the various commissions that the bank was taking and we tagged the bank.

Counting and management is as much a part of who we are and what we do as sharing our design work, and for all the small businesses suffering greatly for the last six months, we wanted them to know that they're not alone.

We have not had one single payment in since the banks closed.

Four days after publishing this, in fact, the bank called us and apologized repeatedly and explained the situation.

They agreed to reimburse us some of the payments withdrawn and asked that we removed the post in return.

We refused, and we explained why, but we said we'll post an update stating the situation as it happened.

This encouraged many others to do the same as well.

In terms of impact, Hatem, do you wanna go ahead?

- Yeah, basically, what we wanna also highlight is that as designers, we are often called upon to perform a service, one whose parameters are quantifiable in terms of form and performance.

How will my design fit and what impact will it have?

Our focus is on the market, the reach, how many centimeters, clicks, or dollars?

Basically, they call us problem solve workers, and we are here, basically, to perhaps challenge this notion, or at least say that, yes, of course, design does solve a lot of problems, or it is created, perhaps, or intended to solve people's problems, but we find that this kind of narrow definition eliminates a lot of agency from the hands of designers, and it eliminates a lot of potential for what design could be and what designers could do and how they could change things that are happening around them.

So basically, this is one of the questions that's always burning in our heads.

Where in the ranks of all known professions is graphic design positioned?

Graphic design badly remains largely excluded from the cultural scene.

We see this a lot hindered in Beirut.

We've seen this very flagrantly where we feel that design is separated from any other kind of cultural event or cultural production.

We are seen as the executors of the content that is delivered to us rather than the creators of the content.

So exceptionally, I mean, the exception usually is when we are working for the cultural sector or for social enterprises.

This is when we are given a little bit more space.

We are expected to broaden our research to get involved and to have a say.

So there is this expression that we usually use a lot, particularly in teaching, that the designer is an author or thinking of the designer as an author or as a social agent or as an activist, but we feel that this expression can only be actualized in select circumstances with those particular kinds of projects.

So you're an author or you are the social agent or an activist when you're working for these sectors and not like in the absolute.

We're gonna talk a little bit about the kafalah system.

The kafalah system is essentially the terms that govern foreign domestic workers agreements or that, kind of, governs the way that they work in Lebanon.

This system exists, not only here, but also largely all around us in our region in the Gulf countries and in the Arab countries, and it is a system that strips the workers from most of their rights.

Domestic workers who happen to mostly be women coming from different Asian countries or African countries are stripped of their passport when they arrive to Lebanon.

They are, in many cases, their movement is actually controlled.

In many ways, a lot of people have compared the kafalah system to a sort of modern or contemporary type of slavery.

The wages are terrible, their rights are deprived, and it's altogether a very oppressive system, and during all of the things that we have mentioned, all of the calamities that have hit Lebanon in the past years from the economic crisis to the explosion and the pandemic, a lot of the domestic workers found themselves either without a home or without shelter or without wages from their employers, and they actually do not have access.

They were not even being able to leave the country and go back to their homes, because their passports are confiscated by either their employers or by the firms or the companies that actually hire them or-- - [Maya] The agents.

- The agents that actually get them to Lebanon.

So this was a time when we were working on our fifth issue of the magazine, and the theme was migrations, and in this particular issue, we talked a lot about migrant domestic workers.

In fact, you see here the covers of the magazine featuring two former domestic workers, Mekdes Yilma and Tsigerega Brihamu, who went and left the system to actually together with a group of more past domestic workers found an organization called Egna Legna, and before this organization-- - Before we get into Egna Legna, I just wanna highlight that this is the only instance.

This issue is the only instance where we have the names of the people on the cover written in really big and just that.

The reason for that is for most migrant domestic workers that come into Lebanon, their names are often changed to make it easier for their employers to give them to call them.

So Mekdes Yilma, nobody will know that her real name is Mekdes Yilma.

They'll call her Maggie, and that's the name that she'll go with, because it's too much effort for Lebanese people or for Arabs to use the full name, and so it was important for us to publish their full first and last name on the cover as is, and this is the only instance where we do that.

- So this issue actually came out at the beginning of the outbreak of the pandemic.

So also you can see that the images that are on the cover were shot by Myriam Boulos through the screen through a Zoom call, and the issue featured a long interview with both of the women who founded this organization, Egna Legna.

At that time, it was a really, really tiny organization.

We are highlighting here the number of followers, not necessarily to say that this is a measure of how big the organization was, but just to give you an idea about the reach of this group.

After the publishing of this article, we started getting contacted by a lot of organization media outlets to, in fact, cover the story or to continue this conversation that already had started, and a lot of people were advocates of fighting the kafalah System already.

This is a spread from the article featuring more photographs by Myriam Boulos of domestic workers on their day off on some days doing different kinds of activities, and a long again interview with Studio Safar who asked them very, it's quite a difficult kind of article that talks about the hardships and the daily life and the daily strife that these women were going through.

Maya, I'll hand it over to you.

- So after publishing it, as Hatem said, we started getting contacted about the kafalah system that was taking place in Lebanon and what people could do and how can people reach any Egna Legna, and in many instances, many of the media platforms that we've collaborated with in the past or knew started reaching out to Egna Legna themselves and covering the the racial injustice that was happening in the region, of course, tying the kafalah system to that.

Shortly after that, many news platforms were also covering the kafalah system injustice and writing articles about it and also reaching out to Egna Legna as a reference point for the kafalah system.

This also led them to mobilize and create protests in the city that were also driven by these organizations and these unions themselves, but this time, they were joined by Lebanese people.

Hatem, back to you.

- Basically, we're just gonna talk a little bit briefly about the magazine.

Studio Safar started, and you'll see the first issue, Norooz, in the top left corner.

It was like a 16 page tiny pamphlet as a pilot issue and just seeing and where this could lead us.

Over the years and seven issues into this, the magazine has really turned into our actual voice.

It has become the space that we use to enact our politics and to enact our protests and to become the designers as authors that we always, kind of, teach our students to do.

- I also wanna highlight that through the work we did in the magazine and the journal and through our voices and publishing and publishing the words of other designers and other writers and other cultural practitioners, we also started getting a lot more of the types of works that we could get out of bed in the morning for.

You're seeing snippets of this in the videos, but we worked on one of Beirut's biggest music venues from naming to branding to tone of voice to what was their edge, what differentiated them from nightclubs in the city to their actual the curation of their DJs to all of the communication strategy and the communication material and the way-finding.

Another project that resembles this in essence is the very first Arabic or sexual wellness brand for women in the Arabic region targeted to Arab women, and it was created by Arab women that also produces products.

One of the first products they released into the market is a vibrator for women, and vibrators for women in the region are not only taboo, but they are illegal.

So we worked on the whole conception of this brand from naming to communication strategy.

We conducted a lot of focus groups, wrote a lot of texts, and turned this into a brand that is very culturally conscious and very quiet so that it doesn't turn the wrong heads, and to this date, it's been doing very, very well, and the brand has sold out of their very first product, which is quite something.

This is the latest issue, which is networks.

Safar's latest and seventh issue examines the sprawling and ubiquitous life of networks, networks of money, and the many, many ways it moves, but also networks of food, networks of distribution and consumption, networks of care and mutual support, networks of resistance and networks of revolt against the complicated webs that continue to divide and force binaries and oppress.

This issue highlights how different networks are manifested in the visual realm via drawings, maps, photographs, documents, and renderings, and it also aims to engage with the history of radical networks such as mutual aid, anti-colonial, and transnational feminist formations that may teach us how to mobilize against our present and towards emancipatory futures.

These are the inside covers, so it's featuring the same person, and I've published, here, the text that was written by two powerhouses from the studio who wrote this, Maggie Doueihi and Sharon Grosso.

I'm gonna read it out loud.

"The day we shot Adelle, who's on the cover, in Ehden, "North Lebanon, the exchange rate on the black market "was over 20 times the official government rate.

"Hyperinflation is one of the most crippling "and visible manifestations of Lebanon's economic crisis "over the last three years.

"We aren't kidding when we say everyone "and their mother has become a serraf, a money exchanger, "which is what Adele is.

"Adele manages the money for her son's restaurant "where they now deal with a daily influx of tens of millions "of Lebanese liras.

"They carry bags of the local currency home "only to exchange them for a handful of dollar bills.

"Customers pay in lira, but suppliers "only accept payments in dollars.

"Adele found herself exchanging lots of paper money "for friends and family and neighbors and customers, "and her nickname, Imm el Dollar, which is Dollar Mama, "has stuck ever since.

"This issue of Safar is about networks."

It's signed by Maggie Doueihi and Sharon Grosso and the little asterisks at the bottom says, "Hyperinflation in Lebanon has sent the value "of the Lebanese lira plummeting from 1,500 Lebanese pounds, "which is $1 in 2019, to 34,000 Lebanese pounds "to the dollar on the day that this photo was taken."

These are some spreads from the latest issue.

It's launched on the website, in the market, and on many magazine stores online.

In the seventh issue, Safar explores the community building practices and spaces of print collective from New York to Spain, discusses symbols and short-term safe spaces in Palestine, shares the black American lineage of resistance through mutual aid, examines the direction in which film distribution and production have historically flowed in Lebanon, follows the intricate and exhaustive naming process for a one-of-a-kind master's degree program in design, delves into one professor's viral course on Ye, this is in Montreal, asks questions about cultural funding and the ways money moves, traces the global webs that weave together land, food, consumption, and occupation and more.

We've also been collaborating with Flint Magazine since 2018, which is a multimedia magazine in a box, on researching, curating, and designing their third issue, which is themed, wonder.

Wonder is the precursor to action, to development, but wonder can also lead to nothing.

The idea of a wonder stems first from the human imagination.

By removing physical angiographic constraints.

Flint Magazine issue three aims to collect and present seven new possibilities of wonder.

Here's three.

- Basically, it's been a wild journey with Ben and Maia, and here I just want to thank both Ben and Maia for going on this journey with us, without which we wouldn't be actually speaking to everyone here in this room.

The work that you're seeing on the top right is a miniature book called Seven Artifacts of Smartness, and it specifically tackles the the ways in which the holy city of Mecca, the smartness of the Holy City of Mecca and this kind of pilgrimage site in a very critical way, of course.

The LP that you see in the center is called the Wondererous Vibrations of Having Ababa, who is pioneering electronic music, a American Egyptian musician who is like, today we are starting to uncover, really, the breadths of how instrumental his work has been, and so here, you will find some tracks that have never been released on vinyl before.

So look out for this album.

It's really great.

On the top left is a poster from the series, Allah, by Jordanian designer and artist, Mosemna Hasen, which basically creates in different renderings of the platform where people submit the work of the word, Allah, written in different translations and different ways.

So this is just a small collection of what you'll find in issue three last month.

- Yeah, stay tuned for the actual full box and the Full Seven Wonders.

We're gonna enter the video that is the last of the series you've been watching.

- [Female Voice Over] Safar is a graphic design and visual culture magazine published out of Lebanon in Beirut.

This is truly one of the most exciting publications that has launched in recent years.

It's definitely a personal favorite of mine.

One of the wonderful things about it's printed in both Arabic and in English.

It's a bilingual magazine, and that, kind of, really informs the design of the publication, which is consistently exquisite.

This issue is themed, power.

There's this really spectacular cover that really sets the tone of a female, pictures of a female body builder, and the material inside is just kind of unexpected and (music drowns out the speaker).

- [Maya Voice Over] We had the publishing itch from the very start.

Before Safar was born, Hatem had co-founded Samandal Comics and Annyhaya Records.

There has always been a big gap in writing about regional design and visual culture.

There were conversations to be had and disputes and opinions and discoveries to be made.

We started the journal because we wanted to stop and to reflect.

The magazine was both an internal field of experimentation and a public interface of our thinking.

Through making it, we discovered our voice.

We spoke about the urgent topics that were shaping our world, nostalgia, migration, power.

(inspiring electronic music) - What's also interesting about nostalgia is that we can miss the very things we've hated.

- At least this is my circle of communication with my students.

I want to preserve as much as I can and give it to somebody else.

- So if people tell you this is impossible, you'd want to do it.

- It's such a beautiful thing to be able to combine things that you love and where you come from and put them into something that you're very passionate about.

(eccentric orchestra music) - Thank you.

(audience applauds) There will be a Q&A with two microphones up here.

So whoever would like to ask any questions, you can come forward.

Hi, you can use that microphone.

Oh, okay.

(laughs) - [Audience Member] Hi, I have a question.

Is this on?

Can you hear me?

- I don't think it's on yet.

I think we're just gonna wait for it to calm down a little bit, and then we'll turn them on, right?

Right, yeah, just a minute.

You can go ahead.

- Hello, oh, wow.

Hi, I just wanna say I really appreciated the sort of presentation you gave us.

It was really powerful and something like, I'm also a person of color and something that I always think about is when we're expressing these narratives about these really hard truths about people from our community, how do you go about navigating not feeding into the stereotypes or the mainstream media, because a lot of the stuff, like the truth hurts, and so it's like really easy to, sort of, cave in, but how do you, sort of, maintain this hopefulness or just this authentic-ness, especially considering that I'm not Lebanese and a lot of people here aren't, and so how do you go about navigating these narratives in a really informative way that doesn't also single one story, I guess, yeah?

- Thanks for asking a very important question like that.

I guess one answer to that would be we would make sure that the story is we're not telling someone else's story, and if we were, we would make sure to address it with extreme care and delicacy, delicateness, sorry, and we would also, if we were to tell a story that's happening instead of telling it from our own perspective, it's important to echo what's already being told.

Hatem, I don't know if you wanna an add to that answer.

- Yeah, I wanna say that again, it's a great question, because I think the chance to, in fact, be heard is what actually pushes us to continue to do this, because there is a kind of satisfaction in being able to reach people and feel that you're not alone in all of the whatever it is that you're going through that pushes us to continue to do this.

- Thank you.

- Hi, thank you for coming and speaking to us.

My questions always sound so much better in my head than when I try and speak them out loud, but I'll try my best.

You started off this lecture talking about the, (mic feedback rings) oh, sorry, it's a weird feedback, but you started talking about the importance of having representations of local graphic design, history that might have traditionally been considered like history of art and more academic than actually like useful, practical stuff that still plays out in meaningful ways, and since you engage with current topics, how often do you find yourselves going back and finding a means of production from like, I don't know, even like a couple hundred years ago and being like, oh, this is perfect for the topic that we're talking about right now.

How often do you see that continuity?

- So often and sometimes it's not even like going back to look at a piece of text or a book or an article.

Sometimes, it's actually looking at packaging, whether it's like old candy packaging that still exists or like a traditional perfume bottle that my parents, my grandparents, and their grandparents have been using for ages and ages and ages.

Sometimes, it's just in the details of those things that something clicks in your head, and you're like, okay, that's part actually of the visual culture of this region.

- [Woman In Glasses] All right, thank you.

- [Maya] You're welcome.

- [Joseph] Hello, my name is Joseph.

- [Hatem] Actually on the.

- [Maya] Yeah, go ahead, Hatem.

- Sorry, I just wanted to add this thing, because you talked about packaging.

I think it's also very important to say that even in the most, let's say, trivial or commercial of items that are designed, like let's say the packaging of a candy or a bar of soap that we have to always remember that these designed items get imbued with a kind of a cultural significance by the fact that we use them on a daily basis, and we start to attach memories to these items, and we start to have a sort of emotional connection, and we start to weave stories around them.

So the way in which all of these objects infiltrate our lives, and they become part of how we identify and what we remember and all of that stuff makes it important for us, again, to realize that we're not only cultural agents when we are working on cultural projects, but we are also cultural agents even when we are designing any item, in fact.

- Absolutely, and even like those packages, the soap bars, or the perfume or the candy or anything like that, when we do reintroduce them or something or elements from these packages into our work or design thinking, it's very important not to address it with like as if it's a pastiche, and that's why we used those words in the beginning.

- Hello.

- Hi.

- My name is Joseph.

I just wanna say thank you so much for coming here.

I love the presentation.

I just had a quick question.

I really enjoyed the part how you talked about preserving the unique Lebanese Arab design culture, and I was just wondering how you conceptualize design also as a means of liberation throughout the global south and uniting people's together.

- [Maya] Hatem, do you wanna take this one?

- Sure, how do we think about this in a sense as a form of resistance, right, a form of liberation?

I mean, essentially, design is very much about communication, and when you are actually aware that the tools that you have studied and that you have been practicing to communicate for, let's say, brands or objects are the same tools that could allow you to, in fact, be better at communicating with other groups.

This is the opening.

This is the door towards emancipation.

This is the door towards people getting organized, getting together.

This is what we saw during the uprising, 2019, in Beirut, people putting out handwritten signs in the streets and using technology like when we were having internet cuts, using other forms of technology in order to communicate.

So there is a lot of ways, whether it's practical or conceptual, to use design, and again, of course, like in the form of publishing, like if you're publishing a magazine or a periodical or even on social media.

When you use the tools that you have in order to bring these voices out and connect different people together, this is a very powerful form of resistance and emancipation.

- Yeah, and to add to that, also, a question we get a lot is why is it a printed magazine?

Why don't you just make it digital?

The reason for that is, first, just because we love printed material, and the second reason for that is that we are very adamant about the actual words on physical paper occupying actual, physical space and existing forever on the shelves of people's homes and in schools and libraries.

- Absolutely, thank you so much.

It means more than you know, and I'd love to talk to you in the minute at the end if you have some time.

- Sure, of course.

- Thank you so much.

- Hi, my name is Simran Bri, I'm an MFA student at the Stamp School of Art and Design.

I have two questions.

I'll start with one, and then if we have time, I can ask you the other afterwards, but I'm an artist, and in my own artistic practice, I work a lot with, sort of, culture and knowledge and thinking about, sort of, like colonial legacies and often, that happens through language, and so I was really interested in the way in which you're working bilingually or multi-lingually, and I wanted to ask about the sort of methodology for translation, like what's the primacy of language?

I'm not an Arabic reader or speaker, but I noticed that some words are transliterated rather than translated, and I've done my own sort of translation projects, and that's always, sort of, like a matter of deep, critical thought in terms of English being a colonial language and then Safar being written in English and then also being translated into English when it's not a word that can necessarily be translated.

Also a word that I understand coming from a Hindi Punjabi background, because a lot of those words come from Arabic and then something like nostalgia being written out in Arabic as something that can't be translated into Arabic.

That's the first question, and then I'll stand in line again.

- Okay, that's a great question, and actually translation makes up a very, very big part of our work on how we address our work.

I mean, the translation work that we do even for our commissioned work is dealt with with a lot of thought and care, because there is always that question, right?

Do you transliterate or do you translate?

And if I'm working on the title, I mean, we're working on an exhibition right now.

We're working on the title of the exhibition too, the name of the exhibition too, and it's going to be bilingual, because it's about a historical site in Beirut, and there's that debate now is do we come up with a title in English and then translate it to Arabic or do we have separate titles in English and in Arabic, but that together make one new meaning?

And if you don't necessarily know the other language, then it's okay, it doesn't remove from the meaning of the original one, but there are all of these questions that are often asked, and also, when we are designing bilingual identities, let's say, or bilingual packages or communication strategies, sometimes we'll be given a more priority to one language over the other, and usually, it's English, because English is spoken more widely in Lebanon, in fact, than Arabic is, and the Arabic will only, kind of, be there just to, kind of, reinstigate that this brand is borrowing from the culture, or it's taken from an old Arabic bar or et cetera, et cetera.

It's sometimes only there for that reason as opposed to it actually being fully bilingual, and in other instances, of course, it will be 100% bilingual.

In the case of Safar, it's a hundred percent bilingual, and we spent a lot of time and money working with translators and very specific translators, because terminologies used in design and English don't exist in Arabic, and so many times we coin new words with these translators that we work with.

- If I may add, also, I mean, what's very important for us when it comes to this whole idea of bilingualism, particularly in the magazine, but also in other aspects of the work, is that for the magazine, one of the reasons why, I would say there are two main reasons why we translate everything, because on one hand, it's important for us, particularly if we're translating from English to Arabic, it's very important for us that this material is actually, that it exists in Arabic, that it gets published in Arabic.

So translating to Arabic is important to have this knowledge be available in this particular language, but the other aspect is actually in the beautiful and thought-provoking art form which is translation, and for that, as Maya said, we work with translators who are very innovative, because they often have to come up with new words for ideas that do not have these words in Arabic, I mean, and terms that are related to, let's say, technology or graphic design or whatnot are often, or science, you will not find a lot of these terms in Arabic, and this is where you will have a lot of transliterations, but the most exciting thing is to actually coin new words using this language.

So yeah.

- [Maya] Yeah, I mean, how do you say cisgender in Arabic?

I think you-- - I mean there there is, actually, there's someone who's working on a whole dictionary of gender and sex related terms to Arabic.

- [Maya] I think you had a follow up to the question?

- Yeah, I mean, I think, also, just in terms of thinking about translation, the type of translation is always like a thing.

So sometimes, like for me in Punjabi, sometimes when you get a translator to translate something, it's like in a form of the language that no lay person is gonna understand, and I'm wondering if that's a similar thing that you run into in Arabic where some translators just really wanna translate it word-for-word when that's not necessarily, especially for the context of a magazine the way that you want it to be translated.

- Absolutely, but we do make sure to, kind of, act as editors here and review that and give our feedback on that, and we won't necessarily say, okay, yeah, fine, go for it, if we feel like it's hindering the meaning of the work.

- I mean, it also gets more complicated, because spoken Arabic is different than written Arabic.

So written Arabic is almost like an old, like the classical written Arabic is actually not spoken by anyone, like nowhere.

If you go to different Arab countries, each one would have the dialect which changes the language in a different way.

So in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Lebanon, it's quite radically different as a spoken language.

- Yeah, it's like Shakespearean English versus spoken English.

- Exactly, but nobody actually in the street, anywhere in the Arab world or in the world, I would say, speaks, on a daily basis, the classical Arabic, which is the language that my qued in books in or the newspaper or like most of literature is written in that classical Arabic.

- Someone else has a question?

- Hello, really, I was just wondering, I've never really known much about Middle East politics or anything, but I'm wondering if you've ever run into issues with feedback from people, like getting anything hurtful or people just being blatantly, like don't like your work?

I'm wondering does the public enjoy it or do you have any issues with government or just interference, kind of, like in US politics where it's feedback through the internet and other things like that?

- It's mostly feedback through the internet, but I wouldn't say on the larger scale we get a lot of that.

There are definitely lots of people that just don't like us and don't like our work, but we don't necessarily get threats or attacks.

The one most palpable thing, I guess, we've faced is that in one of the past issues, there was a big piece about Hezbollah, about Hezbollah's communication strategy, and it got, I mean, we also don't know for sure what happened, but we print our magazines in London, and we have an order usually shipped to Beirut so that it can exist in the bookstores in Beirut, and that got held at the port for, I think, like over two to three months, and we just couldn't figure out why.

In the end, they made us pay an absorbent amount of money to get them out of the port, and we later discovered that the port is actually controlled by Hezbollah affiliated people, but we don't know that these are directly related, but this is, I would say, the most palpable thing.

Hatem, do you have anything else to add to that?

- I mean, it's not necessarily because of the magazine, but we are living in a constant conflict with our government.

So I would say it's there anyway despite our work or irrespective of the work that we do on the magazine.

- Awesome, thank you.

- You're welcome.

Hi.

- Hi, I'm Libby.

Thank you so much for your presentation.

I just have a quick question to follow up to the translation question.

When you're writing in your magazine, do you tend to use more of that written more traditional Arabic language or do you use more spoken Arabic or do you try to bring in that more casual nature, more spoken nature?

- It's definitely more casual, but it's not written in the very proper Arabic.

There is usually an in-between that gets published in magazines and books and newspapers, well, not newspapers.

Newspapers, usually, are quite formal, but it's called (speaks in a foreign language), which is a language that is a little bit less formal than the proper Arabic and is understood across all the Arabic countries.

- [Libby] Okay, thank you.

- [Maya] Hatem, would you say that, would you agree?

- Yeah, and I would also say that it depends also on the contributors.

In some cases, the contributors have decided to use particular, even slang or the particular spoken language from a particular region.

So it really depends on the tone of the piece itself.

There isn't a unifying guideline throughout the magazine.

- [Libby] Thank you.

- So my next question, how do you balance design that is de-colonial and like you were saying, things that make you wanna get out of bed while sometimes being in the service of businesses and corporations and the like, who are driven by capital, a force that tends to be hand-in-hand with the history of colonialism?

Similarly, how do you navigate or question the feeling of, at least what I think, the necessity of complicity in social media, which is its own sort of can of worms in terms of being like multi-billion dollar corporations, but also the type of political sway or political impact that those things can have and how design is very integrated into that contemporarily?

- First, I would say our work is very far from de-colonial.

We're still very, very influenced by colonial structures and design and influences.

I mean, we are, of course, constantly borrowing from various design, what do you call, design eras of in history, but there is an attempt to de-colonize.

Yeah, I mean, the attempt is in talking about it.

Hatem, do you wanna take the rest of the question?

- Sure, and I will say that, of course, that we have very clear boundaries about what sorts of clients we will agree to work with, and there are some very clear instances where we will say, no, we will not do this.

We will not do this work.

We will not work with these particular, let's say, governmental institutions.

We will not work with particular entities.

So there is already this kind of filtering system to begin with, which will protect us somewhat or protect whatever integrity we try to hang on to as a first step, and then when it comes to corporations, propagating capitalists, and colonial agendas and whatnot, I mean, obviously, it becomes very difficult to disentangle oneself from all of these entities.

So what we try to do is to somehow, I mean, if we're talking about social media, obviously, as so many great associations and enterprises do, is to try to work from within or to try to use the tools that are available to you from within despite the fact that, of course, we know the evils of all of these corporations.

So it's a negotiation, I would say, and at the end of the day, each one of us, we are trapped, in a sense, within the system, and we try to, perhaps, have small victories and topple small injustices wherever possible.

So again, for us living or growing up in Lebanon, a country that suffers from so many kinds of injustices from real deep rooted racism to a lot of class struggles and a lot of economic inequality and-- - Of course, Lebanon is a post-colonial country too.

- Yeah, so again, it's a question of making these small steps to-- - We can take, sorry, Hatem, we're gonna have to wrap this up.

- [Hatem] Yeah, sure.

- We can take one more question.

- [Simran] Thank you.

- Yeah, but don't worry about it, because the second part of his answer actually addressed that question.

I was gonna ask about when you'll turn down clients and what criteria you'll use turn down clients, and I think that really answered that question.

If you'll have time for one more answer, it'd be nice to hear a story about a time that actually happened.

I mean, it's completely fine if you don't want share, but it'd be nice to hear one.

(chuckles) - [Maya] Do you wanna tell the story?

- About a story of a turning down a client?

- Yeah, an example of when that happened?

- Which one are you thinking about?

Do you have one in mind?

- Maybe we can sum up the gov.

clients.

- I mean, to be honest, in recent years, we have been turning down projects, I would say, on a monthly basis.

Every month, at least one client reaches out, and it almost feels like there's an insistence on trying to get us to work with particular governmental entities, and we are just simply, consistently refusing, and every time, Maya and I look at each other, and we're like, okay, they're just gonna throw so much more money at us, but it feels good to be able to say no.

It feels good to be able to say, I've made up my mind, and I'm not going back from there.

I mean, we don't work with, let's say, the government of Saudi Arabia.

We don't work with-- - The government of the United Arab Emirates too.

- And we don't work with Israel.

Obviously, there is a lot of, and either with the government of Lebanon.

So there are certain kinds of hegemonys that we will just not not be able to tolerate.

- Yeah, I mean, there was an instance, speaking of governments, where we were asked to work on the campaign of a politician, and we refused, and then several months later, his wife, kind of, came to talk to us about her project without telling us she was his wife to, kind of, trick us back into working on that, and like Hatem said, I mean, we get just money thrown at us to do these campaigns, and we definitely refuse to do them.

The bad side about this is that we don't actually make that much money, but the good side is that we sleep really well at night.

I think that's it in terms of questions.

- [Man In Black Shirt] Yeah, thank you guys so much for-- - Thank you, everyone.

(audience applauds) - Thank you, everyone, for coming.

Thanks, Hatem.

It's almost 2:00 AM, right?

- [Maya] Yeah.

(laughs) - Thanks for staying up with us, and Maya, thanks for being here.

Thank you all for your questions to your presentation.

- [Maya] Thanks, everyone.

(everyone applauds) - Thank you for having us.

- [Maya] Bye, Hatem.

- [Hatem] Good night, bye.