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The Derivative is a bi-annual online publication launched in October 2020, in the midst of unprecedented political, social, economic, and environmental collapse in Lebanon. It is an attempt at building collective vocabularies, registers, and practices able to account for and run against the systemic onslaught we are faced with.

The Derivative is a student of the uprising of Oct 17, 2019; it is first and foremost a rhizomatic object around which to mobilize a diversity of praxes. Experimenting with collective editorial models, each issue is above all an excuse to think and make together and a way to expand and strengthen networks of friends and allies through divergent modes of address, thought, and action.

Every issue of The Derivative starts with three guest editors, each assigned a theme in the form of a three-letter root word (جذر) in Arabic. Each editor then collaborates with five contributors to help unfold the various facets of each theme, as well as an artist contribution responding to each text.

lori

Autobiography of a Flame

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When I arrived to the so-called upper epochs, it’s not as if I knew where I was going. I’d been underground for a while—years likely passed before I’d surfaced. Now I was scaling the hinterlands from their disproportion. The way they’d been trampled and debased, made worthless and dead—enough to make you grind your teeth […]

No one will ever know what it’s like to be a Ghost

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My mother passed out on the night of December 22, 1984 when her gynecologist, tipsy at a Christmas gathering, mistakenly directed the nurse over the phone to give her a general anesthetic instead of a local one. When the doctor arrived in the morning, he delivered a baby that was, in medical slang, “a blue […]

Transcendent Human / Ordinary Human

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Early in the morning, the last day before I left Beirut, the dollar was still at 1500LL. I walked toward the Corniche in the dark before dawn, waiting to take a taxi (service) to the airport. In Farsi, we call the sky before sunrise “Wolf and Sheep” (گرگ و میش). The term was probably coined […]

Issue: 03 03/22_08/22

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ش.ب.ح (Ghost) Guest editor: Mirene Arsanios Written contributions by Haytham El Wardany & Lama El Khatib, Suneela Mubayi, Christian Nyampeta, Salma Shamel, and Asiya Wadud. Artistic contributions by Maxime Hourani. ب.ش.ر (Human)  Guest editor: Sumayya Kassamali Written contributions by Majd al-Shihabi, Alexandra Chreiteh, Golrokh Nafisi, Hicham Safieddine, and Hana Sleiman. Artistic contributions by Aline Deschamps. […]

Human (ب.ش.ر)

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In Defense of Humanity “Are we not human, too?” (منّا إنسان كمان؟) In conversations with migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, I heard this sentence so repeatedly that I came to understand it as the refrain at the heart of the kafala system, rhetorically posing the question of foreign humanity inside Lebanese syntax. The brutal simplicity of these three words […]

Fire (ح.ر.ق)

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The Book of Dreams In the summer of 2020, pandemic shutdowns and far-reaching fires in California kept residents like myself inside for weeks. A muddied orange glow shifted the skies for days on end and I, with the many others, mourned the loss of life and land, stunned by the enormity and physical transformation the […]

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DISCLAIMER

The editors have made every effort to contact all copyright holders of the images used in this publication. If you claim copyright of any of the images presented here and have not been properly identified, please contact the editors with sufficient proof that you are the copyright holder. They will update the publication with a formal acknowledgment of your copyright.

MANAGING EDITOR

Haig Aivazian

Resident Editor

Lori Kharpoutlian

Arabic Editor

Rida Hariri

VISUAL CONCEPT AND DESIGN

Studio Zumra

WEB DEVELOPMENT

Jazilan

FONTS

29LT Azer by 29Letters and WorkSans by Wei Huang

Publisher

Beirut-Art-center_Logo_Final-white

beirutartcenter.org

© 2020–2023 The Derivative • المشتق. All Rights Reserved. Beirut Art Center Association.