Concept Note 

I often find myself oriented toward concepts that guide me through layered daily interactions.¹ To notice how I embody and transmit them, whether digitally or in person. To move between the perceptions, emotions, and thoughts I carry within me, the encounters that unfold in my immediate circle, and the institutional and governmental correspondences that mark daily life. As a woman who grew up in Amman, learning to navigate the multi-layered interactions required attunement and adaptability, sensing what is accepted or not and how to go about it.² As an immigrant, now living in Amsterdam, these encounters arrive as letters and reminders - systematic yet frequent, unavoidable, inscribed into routine. While surveillance takes many shapes and forms, from shame to encoded biases - its traces lie within these intricate processes and subtle daily encounters. 

Through these encounters, a question recurs : how much of what I carry is shaped by my own perceptions, learned behaviors, and personal history?³ How much is  dictated by what I engage with, and the ways it influences me?⁴ In between these questions, bein w bein emerges, as an in-between space, a portal⁵ where values are not yet fixed, where processes themselves become the focus of attention.

In this in-between space, I can pause and reflect. To ask: How do I feel? In relation to whom? Are they benefiting from me feeling this way, how? Towards which place and time? What perceptions, thoughts, and actions arise alongside this feeling? Am I the only one experiencing this? To notice, to question, to trace the sources and influences while keeping myself open to possibilities.⁶

Bein w bein grows out of this continuous self-work into an evolving site that brings people together, to expand rather than contract.⁷ This leads to noticing how self-isolation and internalized regulation, as Cathy O’Neil describes, are often shaped to serve capitalist values or reinforce social insecurities, so that external forces do not need to intervene directly. Through a workshop series, together with the target group, we can trace the histories and patterns of daily experience and in a creative act, question and channel what feels ‘natural,’ using the very tools that inhibit us, whether they be strong emotions like shame, or surveillance technologies that track our bodily movements and facial expressions.⁸ This site encourages play, discussions, curiosity, experimentation with sound, voice and movement, while weaving together the threads of theory and practice. 

Through these processes, bein w bein exists in-between, a threshold where reflection meets action, observation meets participation. The project opens with a performance where the audience observes how the performers’ movements, sound, and interactions transform the space, inhabiting the reflective side of the in-between. It extends into a multi-day installation, inviting participants to actively engage and co-create, linking facial, speech recognition, and body tracking with sound, to generate an evolving sensory environment where their presence influences the sonic field in real time, inhabiting the participatory side of the in-between.⁹

References

1.Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology - Ahmed’s notion of “orientation” shows how bodies are directed toward or away from objects, shaping possibilities of perception and relation. I use “oriented” here to gesture toward these lived trajectories.

2. Nadia Yaqub and Rula Quawas (eds.), Bad Girls of the Arab World (2013) – I reference this paragraph, which notes that “transgression always involves dynamic interaction between individuals and the communities and structures that shape their lives,” to gesture toward the ways I learned to navigate what is accepted or not in my early social environment.

3.Agneta Fischer, Affective Social Learning (ASL) - Fischer argues that values are transmitted through emotions; what is feared, loved, or desired is not purely individual but socially inherited.

4.Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion - Ahmed suggests that emotions “stick” unevenly: some bodies become saturated with fear or love more than others, producing unequal orientations in social space.

5.Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time - Rovelli describes time as relational and layered, more like a network of events than a linear flow. I draw from his reflections on thresholds and entanglements to think of “portals” as openings where space and time fold together, resisting singular direction or closure.

6. Cathy O’Neil, The Shame Machine -  O’Neil outlines steps for recognizing and responding to shame, including pausing, questioning sources, and tracing social influences. This footnote situates the reflective practice above within that framework.

7. Cathy O’Neil, The Shame Machine - O’Neil explains that self-censorship, self-isolation, and internalized regulation are not purely individual phenomena; they often serve external systems by making people conform voluntarily, maintaining capitalist or social hierarchies without direct intervention.

8.Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression & Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology — Surveillance technologies are embedded with social biases that constrain bodies and expression, shaping who is visible, audible, or able to act freely.

9.Buckminster Fuller - “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” (goodreads.com) — guiding principle for creating transformative systems through alternative models.