Beirut - Agencies
The Lebanese Embassy in London has announced that the Lebanese Festival Day Group for the Annual festival will take place place on June 24th, 2012 at Cavendish Square London. The Embassy added that the festival aims to create awareness and educate the wider British community about Lebanese culture, customs and traditions whilst promoting Lebanese cuisine, culture, education and importantly tourism. http://lebanesefestivalday.com In addition, The Mosaic Rooms, A.M. Qattan Foundation and The Museum of Architecture (MoA), a new London based organisation dedicated to public engagement with architecture and the built environment are hosting Home, an exhibition that picks apart the very fabric of what makes up the home in the Arab world. This project is presented as part of the British Council’s International Architecture and Design Showcase 2012 (21 June – 23 September): a global gathering of cultural projects investigating architecture and design from across the world. Lebanese architects from L.E.FT Makram el Kadi and Ziad Jamaleddine will take part in this exhibition and will offer a \"One-Door House\": One-Door House is a hypothetical Lebanese house that takes this urban myth and scales it down to the domestic space. It is also a spatial interpretation of Lebanese culture references carried into architecture through an experiential operation rather than a mere metaphoric appropriation. The house asks us to imagine it beyond the normative aesthetic and stylistic preconceptions that fixate on formal biases of the Lebanese traditional context. It looks instead at context not just through its physical dimension but in its broader socio-cultural and political dimensions. http://www.mosaicrooms.org/wp-content/uploads/MOA-PRESS-RELEASE-HOME-Exhibition.pdf The Embassy has also announced a ‘Wide Open School’ at the Hayward Gallery which includes the Lebanese artist, Jalal Toufic, who is a writer, video artist and film theorist and regarded as one of the most important cultural figures in the Arab world. Details below: The Dancer\'s Two Bodies - Tuesday 10 July 6pm and Wednesday 11 July 2pm This two-day class explores different ways of thinking about dance, and considers what kind of body is produced by dance. Toufic looks particularly at the \'subtle dancer\', who is projected beyond his or her body\'s physicality into a realm of altered movement, space and time. He also looks at film, which Walter Benjamin called a medium of sudden \'changes of place and focus\', as a means of revealing extraordinary movement in dance through freeze-frame, reverse motion and slow motion, reconsidering spatial absence and the dancer\'s creation of space. Price: £20 (2 days) http://wideopenschool.com/class/The%20Dancer\'s%20Two%20Bodies