Project at ZK/U - Bassem Saad
Bassem Saad ( Lebanon )
Congress of Idling Persons
At ZK/U Bassem Saad finished the editing and post-production of his film Congress of Idling Persons. Bassem’s film essay features four interlocutors who examine a cartography of protest, crisis, humanitarian and mutual aid, migrant labour, and Palestinian outsider status. Punctuated by the late Arab Spring and the Black Lives Matter revolts of 2020, as well as by the Beirut port explosion, the film weaves through transhistorical constants, from collective rage to mutualism. Bassem will also be developing a short fiction text with the same title.
Conspiratorial Logistics and the Late Arab Spring
In parallel, Bassem worked on a research and mapping project titled Conspiratorial Logistics and the Late Arab Spring for the Vertical Atlas publication. The project looked at the privative regulations and infrastructural cloud developments that sparked the revolt in each historical episode, the infrastructural disruptions accomplished by the protests, the geopolitical influences involved and accusations of foreign backing leveled at the protesters and the contributions made by groups written out of the dominant narratives of the protests, such as migrant worker, refugee, and women’s rights groups.
