سَمُعليكو

​Before I worked in culture, I worked in a market. My family ran a banana ripening facility in the Central Vegetables and Fruits Market on the outskirts of Amman, and from a young age I spent long hours there. The market was chaotic, loud, physical, and beautiful. It ran on labour, trust, and unwritten rules. 

 

Growing up Palestinian through my father and Jordanian through my mother did not grant me citizenship in Jordan. This shaped my relationship to the public sphere in quiet but persistent ways. Access was conditional to paperwork. Certain doors remained half-open, others closed without explanation. You learned to move carefully, to read situations, to understand when visibility was possible and when it carried a cost.

 

I moved into cultural work through proximity. I spent time around music scenes, informal initiatives, friendships, long nights, and a lot of unpaid labour. I later worked for nearly a decade within an independent theatre institution in Amman (Al Balad Theater). On paper, my role was programming and coordination. In reality, it meant negotiating permits, visiting public offices, translating artistic ideas into language that could survive bureaucracy, and mediating between artists, donors, municipalities, and security bodies. This is where I learned that cultural work in Jordan is never just about art.

 

Organising a mural or a performance in public space meant navigating political sensitivities, social expectations, and state oversight. Sometimes it meant compromise. Sometimes it meant silence. Sometimes it meant being called in for questioning. Over time, I came to understand curating less as selection or authorship, and more as mediation - between people, institutions, and spaces that do not naturally align.

 

Eventually, I left Amman and moved to Mannheim to work as a cultural manager with Alte Feuerwache on the Stadt.Wand.Kunst project. The move felt more like a pause. I spent much of that time sitting, observing, and living alone for 6 months in a tower apartment within the Feuerwache. I was present, but not fully embedded. It was a transitional moment — a shift in geography without an immediate sense of direction, where distance created space to reflect rather than to produce. Had this role not existed, I would have returned to Amman. In many ways, that option remains open.

 

From there, I moved to Basel and began working in Zurich within a philanthropic foundation (Drosos Foundation). Today, I work with cultural and youth-focused initiatives across Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine. Being inside an institution has given me a different view of the same systems I once navigated from the other side.

 

Alongside this work, I completed my Bachelor’s degree in "Kunst & Vermittlung", officially translated into English as "Fine Arts and Art & Design Education". To be honest, I am still not entirely sure what I studied. The German term Vermittlung is somewhere between mediation, education, facilitation, and curatorial practice, and the English title never matches even that. What I do know is that it trained me to work in-between (between artists and publics, institutions and contexts, theory and practice) without ever settling into a single role.

 

My involvement with public art and street-level projects over the years helped me shift away from individual artworks and toward the city itself: how people react, who feels addressed, who feels displaced, and what remains after a project is over. I became increasingly aware of the unintended consequences of cultural interventions - including gentrification, exclusion, and the quiet redistribution of visibility.

Alongside this work, I maintain an independent practice through writing, photography, and self-publishing. These are slower spaces for reflection. I use them to think about care, exhaustion, repair, and the labour that holds cultural systems together without ever being acknowledged.

 

I do not see this work as finished or resolved. This website is not an archive of achievements. It is a place to hold fragments (projects, images, notes, and questions) shaped by few years of working between public space, institutions, and lived experience.