Abir Saksouk and Tania El Khoury are part of Dictaphone Group, a research and performance collective that creates live art events based on multidisciplinary study of space, especially in Beirut.
dictaphonegroup.com
Public Works presented their work at Dream City in Tunis, as part of Evidence, an on-going international festival about forensic aesthetics:
lartrue.org/en/festival-...
Abir Saksouk is the co-founder and head researcher at Public Works studio:
publicworksstudio.com/en/home/
The talk is happening now. Abir Saksouk of Public Works Studio shares mapping and archival documentation of Israel's ongoing bombing of Lebanon.
Our first Spring 2026 webinar talk and first collaboration with Fen Live Lab (FโLL/ูู) will be by architect and urbanist Abir Saksouk, presenting โMapping and Documentation as Tools Against Erasureโ live from Beirut TODAY Wednesday 25 February at 12pm EST/7pm Beirut time.
Join us online Wednesday, February 25 at 12:00 pm for a talk by Abir Saksouk of Public Works Studio.
Public Works Studio is a multidisciplinary research and design studio that critically and creatively engages with various urban and public issues in Lebanon. chra.bard.edu/event/abir-s...
HajYahia and Haddadโs award is in support of a film work as part of a collaborative research project theyโre developing together. "A lover is one who waits" contemplates the aesthetics and politics of time and labor as they figure within settler-colonial economies.
chra.bard.edu/news/chras-h...
CHRA alumni spotlight: For her thesis project, CHRA graduate Isabella Indolfi developed and presented a research-based lecture performance titled โLeave the Community Alone.โ The performance explores the politics and ethics of โcommunity artโ in rural contexts.
chra.bard.edu/news/chra-al...
CHRA alumni spotlight: Katya Korablevaโs documentary film Cranes and Ships was screened as part of the 2024 Oxford Shorts International Film Festival in Oxford, UK and the 2025 Mimesis Documentary Film Festival in Boulder, Colorado. Read more at the link:
chra.bard.edu/news/chra-al...
You can purchase our first three volumes of Talks on Human Rights & the Arts for your personal collections and libraries (or for your holiday gifts!) on our website, linked in bio. If you are local, get in touch to schedule a pick up of your copies from our offices at Bard College.
Thank you everyone who joined us from around the world at the re/presentare webinar โReframing Evidence for the Commonsโ. For those who missed it, we have published the entire talk online.
vimeo.com/chrabard/rep...
Evidence is an international festival by Fisher Center LAB, in association with the Center for Human Rights and the Arts. It features programs in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Tunis.
Resilience Overflow by Lara Tabet
In search for Justice Among the Rubble by Public Works Studio
Dignity by Chokri Ben Chikha
The Vertiginous Story of Orthosia by Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
Zifzafa by Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Photos by Tania El Khoury (1โ4), and Pol Guillard (5โ10)
The first program of the international festival Evidence, took place in Tunis in October 2025 curated by CHRAโs director Tania El Khoury and Dream Cityโs Artistic Director Jan Goosens. It featured five installation and performance works programmed during Dream City, a festival by LโArt Rue.
CHRA MA graduate Elie Arden presented โSacrifice Zones: The Rights of Mother Nature, or, Becoming Indispensableโ at the 5th Conference on Latin American Political Ecology held in Mexico City.
chra.bard.edu/news/chra-st...
Not by the researchers producing these indices, but by the state that funded the research to palliate the violence that they are incapable, or maybe even unwilling to stop.
Here, we see risk. It is the risk for the buscadoras once their knowledge has been extracted from them and the machines have been finely tuned to be displaced and discarded.
But as these special and chemical methods occupy a dominant space, they leave little room to allow for different materialities and experiences to act through inclusion, oral histories, dreams and other bodily forms of knowledge as valid epistemologies of violence, that is as evidence.
If we question and attempt to reframe what the communal archive is, who protects it, and to serve whom? We can begin to construct an alternative history that it is their own to create and guard and inherit to their young.
So what is evidence? Instead of asking the San Gregorio farmers to transform their knowledge into methodologies,
we attempt to use art and visual tools to inscribe their history. Through methods and languages legible to them and their communities, but without risking their extraction.
In an effort to colonize these communities, political parties have mobilized people from other states to invade the land and use rubble as landfill to build on top of what were the chinampas.
And so, we enter into a new phase of extraction: One where this ancient situated knowledge [of chiampas] is processed through technoscientific methodologies, and begins to decouple atlapulcan epistemologies from their bodies and their communities.
So, it had to be built upon the efforts of victims of aggressions, civic society, collectives and indigenous communities.
We recognize the urgency and the forensic crisis in Mexico, but understood that the model for re/presentare had to be different because we would be operating from within the lands, politics and societies where violence occurred.
Although it is not the place of the state to recognize their ancestral ties to Pueblos originarios, these communities have learned to navigate the many bureaucratic and judicial roadblocks to protect their lands.
Mexican researchers have recently begun to translate embodied knowledge of buscadoras into a series of scientific methodologies. The work of these scientists, it's incredibly valuable in expanding the search for the disappeared and responding to an urgent and important crisis.
It is not until the mothers are asked directly about other forms of knowledge that they tell the stories of La Vidente and other buscadoras. Suddenly, dreams, desires, and intuition come to the forefront of their descriptions. They do not openly talk about this 2nd dimension of traces and clues.
When describing the many registers in which they work,
they talk about years of acquired knowledge. Passed from one group to another, all strengthened through the scientific methodologies deployed by NGOs and associations.
Las madres buscadores have developed and registered many indicators of possible mass graves. A specific type of flower that only grows under high concentrations of nitrites, or a different color of soil that sinks when the bodies are decomposing.
