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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.

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Mental Health in Lebanon: Socially Buried, Individually Sought

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Given the unprecedented amount of crises that continue to unfold in Lebanon over the last two years, it is not surprising that the subject of mental health has been gaining long overdue traction. The events of the 17 October uprising exposed many to the trauma of a violent police state[1]; the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing […]

Bone Insurrection

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The Dream I Didn’t Dream, Part 1 In my dream, I was taking inventory of the bones in my body, only to find one missing. I must have miscounted, I thought at first. So I counted them all over again only to find, this time round, two missing. A smile drew across my face, certain […]

Seafront Reclamations, Rubble, and Waste: A Metabolic Reading of Lebanese Urbanization

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Since the outbreak of the waste crisis in the wider Beirut area in 2015, the Lebanese government has resorted to the supposedly temporary solution of storing municipal waste in the coastal landfills of Borj Hammoud, Jdeideh, and Costa Brava. Far from being new or temporary, this solution is in fact merely a repetition of decisions […]

Qalaq—Notes from the Making of a Film

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Prologue Rasha Salti Completed in 2018, artist and filmmaker Ghassan Halwani’s film Erased,___ Ascent of the Invisible is heartfelt journey into existential questions, manifest in images, sensations, signs, metaphors, and allegories, on what it means to continue to live with the absence of a person who was kidnapped, to cohabit with the archive of the Committee […]

The Factory of Beasts

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Two weeks into my prison sentence, as I stood by the cell’s open door during exercise time, I saw two inmates holding a third from his underarms. They were walking him through the corridor, with the prison guard hurrying them to move faster as they struggled with the heavy weight of his body and his […]

On Rubble and Buried Meaning

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“Tread softly;For I believe the crust of this earthIs nothing but the crumbled dust of these bodiesIt is disgraceful of us, regardless of time,To desecrate our fathers and forefathers” -Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī [1] There is no clear and documented historical context for the reasons that prompted al-Maʿarrī to write these verses. However, in the context […]

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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.