The “On Entering the Garden” cultural event will take place between August 31 and September 2 in Rabat, at the initiative of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), in collaboration with Kulte Center for Contemporary Art & Editions and in partnership with HIBA Foundation.
The organizers stated that this event, which will be the second part of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture’s (AFAC) 15th-anniversary celebrations launched in Berlin in January with “Cultures of Scandal,” is an opportunity to approach Arab arts and culture from a “garden” perspective.
The same source added that the event will also offer an opportunity to proceed with the critical examination of knowledge production and community formation in the region and its diaspora in an era marked by environmental loss and collapse, explaining that “shifting focus to the garden is an attempt to reactivate the senses and configure new forms of knowledge and imagination within this historical context.”
The organizers noted that the garden, as one of the most widespread and vital tropes of Arab culture, spans poetic, literary, musical, visual, and architectural imaginations from antiquity to the modern era, emphasizing that gardens have vitalized a language and a faith, and lent their names to towns in the region.
In addition, the organizers also announced that the event will see the participation of academics, poets, novelists, film-makers, and performers to explore the concept of the garden as it unfolds in several registers of intellectual and cultural production in the contemporary context of decolonization of ideas and practices, ecological collapse, and drastic political polarization, underlining that this event’s agenda features several activities including lectures, poetry recitals, artistic performances, and film screenings.
