Meeting Points5 - A regional art festival in collaboration with YATF
The fifth edition of Meeting Points Festival presented 100 theatre and contemporary dance performances, 50 visual art installations and 48 nights of films and movies. Over seven weeks starting the 1st of November 2007, these events took place, and some toured several cities, in Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, Ramallah, Alexandria, Minia, Tunis, Rabat as well as Berlin and Brussels.
Meeting Points project was initiated by the Young Arab Theatre Fund (located in Brussels) and Makan in Amman in 2004. The festival aims at promoting creativity and art production mobility in the Arab region, as well as providing the opportunities for artists, art operators and spaces to meet and communicate. It also aims at inviting a wide audience of the local communities to an interactive experience at this international program of events.
Each city contributed with a local project parallel to Meeting Points program. Makan participated with a project entitled Unclassified, curated by Ola Khalidi and Samah Hijawi, it involved public interventions in the city of Amman. Unclassified included four visual artists, they were to consider public life issues and ideas towards art works placed in the public spaces. The work was to approach Amman, its dramatic growth, infrastructure development and rapid increase in population with the large numbers of immigrants from countries around.
The participants were:
Leena Saoub, a project entitled Ammani, large commercial bulletins in several locations in Amman.
Maha Abu Ayyash (Saada), a project entitled Reclaiming Footpaths, involved several streets going up from Downtown and worming through Amman.
Oraib Toukan, a project entitled Can You See Me: Monologues in air, involved rooftops in the intertwined area between Jabal Al Qala, Jabal Amman and Downtown, opposite of Jabal Al Qala and Marka International Airport.
Samah Hijawi, a project entitled Disorientation, involved various public spaces in Amman.
Meeting Points5 participants are:
- Kamilia Jubran from Palestine/Paris in Makan, a concert
- Bikya from Cairo, a music performance
- Bruno Beltrao, from Rio de Janiero, three dance performance entitled ‘From Popping to Pop or Vice-Versa,’ ‘Me and my Choreographer in 63,’ and ‘Too Legit to Quit’
- Sandra Madi from Amman, film screening entitled ‘Full Bloom’
- Nejib Belkadi from Tunis, film screening entitled ‘VHS-Kahloucha’
- Yto Barrada from Tangiers, video screening entitled ‘The Magician: The Smuggler’
- Rami Sabbagh from Beirut, video screening entitled ‘2mg of Rotten Blood on Pure White Snow’
- Roy Samaha from Beirut, video screening entitled ‘Please Rewind Me Later’
- Stefan Kaegi from Germany and Switzerland, performance entitled ‘Cargo Sofia-Amman’
- Khalil Rabah from Ramallah, live streaming entitled ‘Copyright TVZero123’
- Ali Al-Safi from Morocco, movie screening entitled ‘Ouarzazate’- Amal Kenawy from Cairo, performance entitled ‘Eating Me Inside’