“If there were a There, it would be…” 

The Mahmoud Darwish Chair and Camargo Foundation together with BOZAR, A.M. Qattan Foundation and Mucem have launched their joint residency program “If there were a There, it would be…”.

The aim of this residency is to contribute to a contemporary conversation on Darwish’s legacy as well as to support scholars and artists from the Arab world. The four grantees of this program were selected with this consideration and furthermore in view of the multidisciplinary nature of their proposal, its positioning at the intersection of art and research, its ability to bridge the personal and the universal and to question history as well as contemporary national and international politics. The committee expects from the laureates to unveil future spaces and at the same time to dig in the past and its legacies.

The Mahmoud Darwich Chair was founded in 2016 by the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles at the initiative of Minister-President Rudy Demotte, in a consortium with ULB, UCL and BOZAR, which, since 2018, has been its sole operator. By creating this memorial chair, the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles re-affirmed its cooperation with Palestine and its promotion of universal values.

The purpose of the chair is to disseminate the work and thought of the Palestinian poet, who is considered as one of the greatest contemporary authors. His poetry, with its recurring concepts such as exile, memory and love, leads to a reflection on human fragility.

The Chair wishes to present contemporary art from the Middle-East and Maghreb. It wants to promote the work of film-makers, directors, choreographers and writers from the region.

By focusing on Palestine as a metaphor for exile, the Chair highlights culture shock. In the current context of mass displacement of populations, geographical recomposition and "lost geography" are important themes.