سوار قريطم is a multi-lingual artist, designer, and researcher based between Beirut and Amsterdam. Her research and artistic practice focuses on multilingualism and language in times of transformation, well as the construction of society through language. She graduated from the temporary program D.D. (Disarming Design) program at the Sandberg Instituut which centered around the role of art and design under oppressed systems. She was a 2023 fellow at BAK, basis voor aktuele Kunst in Utrecht, a 3-package deal recipient for the year of 2024, and a resident as part of Mophradat’s New Agents program. Her design clients include Gemeente Amsterdam, AFAC, and Mophradat among others.
The work presented by Siwar Kraitem speaks to a testament of change through encounters with language, recording encounters and mementos as part of a reinterpreted calendar of documented time in the Netherlands.
A calendar.
A record of the quotidian.
A calendar of memory, alienation, belonging…
Encounters with a reality of resistance.
A testament of time passing and all that that means, accents shifting.
Notions gained, others lost.
A reimagined familiarity.
The publication is based on spiral binding, allowing for different sequences based on each of the members of the collective’s experiences.
The lecture performance takes on language as a confrontational tool. It addresses language in relation to questions of privilege, hierarchy, and precarity, reflecting on multilingualism and society and tools of social negotiation. Still in my quotidian is a housewarming of sorts for a stranger in Amsterdam, a long awaited one. As Siwar receives their residency permit to stay another two years here, they question what it means to stay in Amsterdam, find space and allow for their language to claim space. It is an invitation to respond to texts Siwar wrote about her encounters with her arabic mother tongue in Amsterdam. It is a collaboration with Alev Ersan, Betül Aksu and Hanieh Fatouraee whom Siwar first met on a screen in 2023, as part of BAK's Fellowship for Situated Practice. Soon after, they formed a gathering called ‘Yaani’ inspired by the common word in colloquial Arabic and Turkish. Alev and Betül will be performing with Siwar about belonging, alienation, and familiarity as part of their ongoing discussion around language. Hanieh's voice will accompany them through a remote yet close proximity.
Since moving to the Netherlands, Siwars’ focus on language and multilingualism have been her driving force. In early 2021, she wrote two letters to her mother tongue, Arabic. The diary-like series in this publication responds to those two letters, documenting Siwars’ evolving relationship with the language since moving to the Netherlands, mainly as a testament to herself and a way of keeping her promise to the language.
Languages act, they perform and inhabit. They also oppress, witness, haunt, and play. Tongues at play is a work that speaks to our multilingualism and the complexity of roles and performativities that different languages play in our lives. At times an oppressor, at others witness, haunter, or impolite, these roles often shift and transform, occupying different objects, spaces, and relevances. In a series of letters addressed to the languages that have so far been part of her journey, Siwar creates a space that attempts to resolve and understand the relationships she has with each, activating memories, reflecting on proximities, and forming new insights and connections spatially. Participants are invited to engage with the letters in a playground-like space where each letter is translated into scale, space, and sound fed by the roles they currently embody in a scene that denotes the transformational capacity of those roles and that present a self-reflective journey as a case study of one’s relationships with languages.