Featuring an installation, music performance, film screenings, talks, workshops, and a publication, The Near and the Elsewhere, presented by Thkio Ppalies, programme running through September and October critically interrogates how individual and systemic borders construct and control dominant notions of Otherness. An opening event is happening in Nicosia on Saturday in Kaimakli’s industrial area.

In response to evolving global crises marked by wars, mass displacement and pervasive surveillance, The Near and the Elsewhere invites visitors to unlearn the architectures of othering that continue to fracture shared realities. The programme aims to foster embodied dialogues rooted in alternative modes of collective belonging and emergent identities.

An installation set up at Thkio Ppalies by Raafat Majzoub will open the autumn series on Saturday at 6pm. For The Near and the Elsewhere, the Institute for Worldmaking (IWM) presents the second iteration of its pavilion, following its debut at Home Works Forum 9 at the Sursock Museum in Beirut, as an interactive, cumulative space for exchange and mutual learning. This spatial intervention transforms Thkio Ppalies into a living site for dialogue, with artefacts designed for gathering, reading and conversation.

Throughout the programme, the pavilion will host a projection of Dua Express, published by IWM’s Lab for Mythology and Alternative Intelligence, alongside contributions from Nicosia-based artists and collectives who will deposit publications in conversation with the ongoing events. Conceived as a porous index, the pavilion grows through participation, holding traces of the encounters that unfold within it.

Majzoub is the Director of the Institute for Worldmaking and a lecturer in the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology. He is the editor-in-chief of the Dongola Architecture Series, co-editor of Beyond Ruins (Architangle) and Design to Live (MIT Press), and co-founder of the award-winning magazine The Outpost.

Also happening at the industrial area of Kaimakli at 9pm onwards, a performance by Sandy Chamoun and Valeda will take place on Saturday as part of the opening event. Sandy Chamoun released her debut solo album, Fata17, a three-track sonic intervention created in response to Lebanon’s October 2019 revolution. Rooted in collective spontaneity and unity amid despair, the album preserves the sounds, emotions, and solidarity that once filled the streets of Beirut. Drawing on field recordings – voices, chants, and instruments – from protests across Lebanon, Iraq and Chile, Fata17 weaves together saxophone, bouzouki, percussion and Chamoun’s voice into a resonant soundscape of resistance.

For Valeda, music-making is an internal, intuitive practice, a way to process and externalise lived experience. In performance, it becomes a conduit for connection, a shared language beyond words. Her work creates moments of collective communion, where, for a brief time, listeners’ souls meet within a tradition of sound and gathering that has endured for millennia.

The Near and the Elsewhere

Multidisciplinary public program curated by Reem Rizk. Opening event with installations and performances. September 13. Thkio Ppalies, Nicosia. 6pm. Kaimakli Industrial Area, Nicosia. 9pm. http://www.thkioppalies.org/