Studio-X Amman Lab and ArtTerritories at Makan are delighted to invite you to an evening with Raafat Majzoub’s ongoing project The Perfumed Garden.
 
The Perfumed Garden is an ongoing performative and interactive process for writing a novel in a contemporary  [Arab] world that blurs the lines between its real and imaginary.
 
Raafat Majzoub conducts various projects including field trips casting people and places in different Arab cities.  These casting videos inspire the characters and settings of his novel, as well as provide recorded documents of life in the Arab world today. So far, his ‘Casting for a novel’ project has taken him to the streets of Beirut, Cairo, and now downtown Amman.
 
For the ‘Reading Errors, The Author is Insane’ event in particular, Majzoub invites audiences to take part in his experimental writing process through the different components of The Perfumed Garden.
 
This event will start with an exposé of the writing methodology of The Perfumed Garden as a whole, followed by reading excerpts from the novel in progress. The readings will include texts inspired by two videos from his ‘Errors’ series, a set of impulsive videos shot and edited within a day, that are used to write bits and pieces of the story. 
 
The second part of this event is an interactive installation that will allow the audience to enter the world of one of the novel’s characters where the their input in the installation will have a direct impact on how the story continues. 
 
Following the installation, the audience is invited to have ‘Drinks With Others’ on Makan’s rooftop. After a week of ‘Casting for a Novel’ in Amman, adding to the archive of casting videos in Beirut and Cairo, ‘Drinks with Others’ is an informal gathering showcasing footage from the three cities. The videos will not be categorized, but rather screened on shuffle in the background creating a mood blurring boundaries between these Arab cities