Our Manifesto

We are a group of Arab artists, immigrants, children of immigrants, and people from elsewhere who want to integrate into the part of Turtle Island (North America) that is known in our days as Canada, without losing our identity. We inspire and promote diversity and inclusion through arts while still maintaining what makes us unique.

We are a creative collective that comes together to create. We value differences, diversity, change, and any kind of expression. We welcome new ideas and we are open to experiment and explore them. We would like to be a channel through which we share and educate the community about ideas, topics, and situations that are subjugated and oppressed.

Because there is only one race, the human race. Because we are all good, and we are all bad. Because we are all in a never-ending quest for pleasure. Because we fear what we don't know. Because we have what we don't need. Because we change and we evolve. Because we have the gifts of anger and empathy. Because we feel alive when in pain. Because we have poisons and we have needs. Because we have the power to create. Because we have the power to love or hate. We will build with our joy, our pain, our rage, our gains and losses, an open wall to listen in.

We are looking to:

• be in a safe place. 
• be accepted and to accept the other no matter what.
• be the person I want to be, and help the other to find their true selves.
• live the present while I am still drawn to the past.
• be honest with my mother and father, neighbors, and family.
• say what I want to say. To talk freely and to listen to others.
• keep my identity and have a voice, and help to represent. 
• give voice.
• Share what I have because we are shy.
• Create, Change, and Have a trace.

We are a collective of Arab artists living or visiting Tiohtià:ke (commonly known as Montreal). We want to create a messy, disruptive, and safe space to perform our individual and collective identities in all their complexities. We want to explore creating, doing, and being as a way of knowledge. We want to experiment with collaborations as a way to create and converse. We want to inspire and be inspired by our personal lived experiences, and express ourselves with alternative modes of expression (textual, visual, performative, etc...). We want to be critical and interrogate the status quo. We want to reflect. We require every artwork to be true to the audience and to not fall into the trap of pretension. We encourage disruptive artwork.

Art doesn't recognize frontiers. It can be found everywhere, it burgeons in the mind of the talented artist who takes it to real life. Art Should be created to impact, to express emotions and feelings. We want to make a change and show social injustice, talk about racism, revolution, industry, justice, liberty, freedom of expression, love, acceptance. Art is who you are, and who I am.  Art is what defines me as a person. We are all artists in a way. We refine a craft, a passion, a know-how,  and put it to real life. Art should push limits, defy rules, tackle taboos and subjects, and be used for awareness. We all fell from the same tree, and we are all different; that is what is special about being human. Art is “connecting” at a human level. It is part of how we communicate.

We are Inclusive, social, cooperative, free expressive spirits. We are multidisciplinary

We are a collective of Arab artists wanting to elevate the critical consciousness and build communities that promote social justice. We use arts in its diversity to imagine a different world that nurtures acceptance, tolerance, respect, and freedom.  We are non-structural, inclusive, multidisciplinary, and unapologetically socialist. Our aim is to develop a social agency that interrupts the status quo and alters oppressive practices. We work in a framework anchored in critical pedagogy which integrates with diverse and multitude complementary liberatory pedagogies. We reach out to collaborate, experiment, and co-create with anyone who believes in what we stand for. We aim to construct a space that represents our voices and ever-changing identities.

We are an Arabe collective. We want to make positive change in the world. We are looking for Artistic collaborations with Arabs and other communities. We want to spread Arab cultures and heritage. We are all refugees looking for adaptation and integration. We want to walk against the currents and defy repressive ideologies. We want to talk about taboos. We want to talk about the things that unite us. We want to express, create and transform ideas into something meaningful.

We are immigrants, Arabs, and Arabic speakers, since Arabic countries include non-Arabs that have a mother tongue in addition to Arabic as their second language (Armenian, Kurdish, Aramean, Syriac, Assyrian, Chaldean, Turkic, Copts, Berber, Mezrahim, Samaritan, Gypsies, Greek...) and there are many second-generation Arabs who don't speak Arabic.