In a region where culture is often forced into defensive positions, squeezed between war, shrinking public space and volatile funding, “the commons” is not a nostalgic but a practical question: what can still be shared, protected and built collectively.
This is at the heart of “Reclaiming Our Commons: A Proposal for Cultural Collaboration Across the Arab Region”, a two-year initiative launched by the Culture Resource (Al Mawred Al Thaqafy) to mark its 20th anniversary. After more than two years of collective work, research and experimentation around the commons as a solidarity-based approach to sustainability, the Culture Resource is now celebrating the completion of 13 artistic and cultural projects developed across the Arab region. The initiative was formulated in partnership with the A. M. Qattan Foundation, and developed with fellow and partner organisations including Ettijahat – Independent Culture, Aflamuna, and L’art Rue, forming a nucleus contributing to funding and programming.
The commons, however, is not being presented here as a fashionable slogan or an abstract framework. The newly appointed director of the Culture Resource, Alma Salem, describes it as an organising idea, a way to reimagine cultural work as shared practice rather than an isolated pursuit. “The commons is not a project in the narrow sense,” Salem says. “It is a vision, a tool for sustainability, and a necessity, particularly in light of the challenges surrounding funding and resources.” This is a crucial distinction. “Reclaiming Our Commons” was not conceived as a conventional support programme. Rather, it was an open call to position culture as a shared resource rooted in collaboration, the exchange of knowledge and resources, and critically rethinking of ownership, production, interpretation and revenues. The selected projects, developed within complex social, political, and cultural contexts, explored themes ranging from archiving and urban space to memory, the environment, oral arts, food practices, cinema, and digital knowledge.
For Salem, leading the Culture Resource is not a managerial transition but “an ethical commitment and collective responsibility”’ With nearly three decades in arts and culture under her belt, she has moved between archival work, institutional cultural management, independent curation, and feminist political organising. Her career has spanned the Levant, North Africa and the Gulf, alongside years in Canada, shaping a practice at the intersection of art and politics without turning culture into propaganda. “I belong to the Arab cultural community,” she says, describing the Culture Resource as “a vital umbrella” that has unified the region’s cultural field for years.
“Cultural work in the region still largely operates in survival mode, a state intensified since 2011. Survival cannot constitute a final horizon,” she says. “The present moment calls for a transition that transcends mere survival, one that looks towards a future-oriented horizon shaped through alliances and intersections between culture, human rights, technology, the environment and the creative economy. The task is not only to keep cultural initiatives alive, but to rebuild the conditions under which cultural imagination can operate beyond constant reaction”
If the commons is an idea, “Reclaiming Our Commons” attempts to give it form. With the projects now complete, their outputs are available as concrete manifestations of collective experimentation. These include commons-based digital archives, counter-mapping practices, shared public spaces, open libraries, methodological tools, and alternative knowledge platforms, alongside artistic and research-based works that underscore culture’s capacity to resist erasure, generate counter-narratives, and imagine new forms of collaboration.
“The commons is not a programme, but a vision for continuity and a framework for collaborative action,” Salem says. “We approach the commons as a long-term institutional commitment that extends across all of our programmes, rather than a standalone initiative.The very name ‘Culture Resource’ reflects this idea, finding ways to diversify and share resources. The name itself carries deep meaning in this context.”
The 13 projects supported under “Reclaiming Our Commons” vary widely in format and geography, yet they circle the same question: what does it mean to reclaim memory, space, knowledge and cultural practice as a collective right rather than a privatised asset?
In Sudan, where war threatens lives, homes and memory, a group of artists, researchers and cultural activists launched the Sudan Art Archive, an open-access digital archive documenting 50 years of visual art in Sudan (1975–2025). The project brings together paintings, photographs, sculptures and archival materials produced by artists and art organisations at a time when cultural memory faces tangible risk due to war, displacement, and the destruction of the infrastructure that used to preserve it. Implemented by The Muse multi studios (Sudan), the initiative responds to the absence of a documented visual history, offering a reference for understanding the development of Sudanese visual arts. It tells the story of artists working amid war and loss, employing digital archiving as a means to protect memory, identity and creative expression.
In Jordan, the Counter-mapping project, implemented by the Makāna initiative, reclaims a tool associated with authority and control: the map. In Amman, where neoliberal urban planning has reshaped the city in ways that sideline residents, the project portrays the city as it is inhabited from below. Through participatory workshops, storytelling, field documentation and collective mapping, it produces alternative knowledge of Amman culminating in an interactive digital map and a critical publication. This raises a fundamental question: who owns the city, and who has the right to tell its story?
In Palestine, Taboo, implemented by the Dahaleez Collective, emerges from Gaza at a moment when the place itself has been rendered unstable, homes reduced to rubble, streets turned into shelters, schools into sites of refuge – yet memory persists. The project recuperates destroyed places through personal and public memories, framing them as “title deeds to the land” in the face of ethnic cleansing, occupation, and forced displacement. Through an interactive digital map combining photographs, video, audio and texts, Taboo documents entire lives that once inhabited these places, a living example of memory as resistance and a voice challenging erasure.
In Morocco, where oral poetry, work songs, folktales and legends are transmitted through voice and memory, the AWAL Archive & Catalog safeguards the oral arts not as static folklore but as living cultural commons. Between 2017 and 2023, AWAL accumulated over 200 works from across the eastern High Atlas, Middle Atlas and southeastern Morocco through a participatory approach rooted in horizontal traditions of “igrawen.” Supported under the commons initiative, AWAL expanded into developing a comprehensive catalogue of existing archives, an open repository for public contributions and a methodological handbook addressing the ethics of documenting oral arts beyond individual ownership frameworks.
In Lebanon, amid ongoing political and economic collapse, the Common Public Library and Auditorium offer a different model: not digital output but a shared physical ecosystem. Developed by the Arab Image Foundation in collaboration with Dawawine and the Cooperative of Cinema Professions, it rethinks cultural work as a shared resource. Grounded in the collective sharing of space, resources, governance and knowledge, it brings multiple organisations under one roof. Over time, it has evolved into an open platform for public programmes, screenings, discussions, daily work and, in times of war, a place of refuge and community support. Here the commons is not a metaphor; it is a lived infrastructure.
Across Syria, Palestine, Canada,and Germany, the Commons Standard Digital Library, developed by the Masrad initiative as the Mashaa Library, works to reclaim Arabic knowledge beyond the market. Before the dominance of commercial digital platforms, commons-based publications circulated hand to hand across bookstalls. Today, much of this non-commercial heritage has become scattered, inaccessible or polluted by advertisements. Mashaa Library offers public-domain Arabic books in clean, accessible formats compatible with multiple devices, while also establishing a style guide meant to ensure continuity beyond the funding cycle. It is a practical experiment in transforming knowledge into a shared resource – open, curated, and independent of market-driven logic or linguistic exclusion.
In Egypt, the Regional Expansion of the Public Inter-Library Online Technology (PILOT) project, launched by CLUSTER (the Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training, and Environmental Research) rethinks civil society libraries and archives as shared resources rather than closed collections. PILOT operates a bilingual platform bringing together more than 30 libraries and archives across five cities, and aims to expand regionally through a unified cataloging system connecting specialised collections and making them accessible to researchers, students, and knowledge seekers. Under the commons initiative, the project invited new member libraries from Iraq, Libya and Algeria, built staff capacities through training, organised workshops on restoration and preservation of rare books, documented these processes as open educational resources, and digitised expired-copyright rare books for public access. It offers a concrete model for how cataloging and resource-sharing can redistribute knowledge on more just terms.
Together, these projects articulate the commons in different dialects: archive, map, memory, oral heritage, shared space, digital library and networked catalogues. They demonstrate what the press statement calls “collective experimentation,” underscoring culture’s capacity to resist erasure and imagine counter-narratives. For Salem, the commons is tied directly to the question of sustainability, not only financial, but conceptual. She argues that sustainability is not achieved solely through participatory models or commons-based practices. It is also linked to entrepreneurial skills and a deeper understanding of the creative economy.
“Cultural sustainability requires moving beyond the binary of institutionalisation versus economic isolation,” she says. “We must remain open to diverse models and interpretations of sustainability. The reality lies in holding both dimensions together.”
In the next phase, she says, the Culture Resource will focus on diversifying funding sources and providing targeted support for cultural organisations to strengthen their financial and fundraising capacities. She stresses that the arts and culture sector is both a profession and an industry, with much skilled and professional labour operation across the Arab region, playing a decisive role in whether societies move towards openness or retreat into closure.
Salem’s directorship comes at a moment of institutional reflection. As the Culture Resource marks its 20th anniversary, the organisation is undergoing a comprehensive review of its programmes to refine its future strategy. The Living Fabric forum in Beirut created a collective space for this process, supported by a major archival effort led by former director Helena Nassif. Salem notes that having a structured archive has transformed how the organisation understands its own history, enabling a more coherent and participatory evaluation process, one she describes as requiring real institutional courage. Yet her argument moves outwards again, to the region itself, where deep instability since 2011, and the way crisis-response became the default mode. Culture, for her, is precisely the space that allows a shift from reaction to foundational action.
“As artists and cultural practitioners,” she says, “we are better equipped to imagine alternatives through the tools we possess: values, ideas, dreams, creativity and collective imagination. These tools are profoundly powerful on one essential condition: that we act together.” At the Living Fabric forum, Salem described the rise of a new cultural network linking the Levant, North Africa and the Gulf, based on mutual exchange rather than centre-to-periphery hierarchies. While inequalities persist, she sees them as negotiable rather than fixed. She highlights a growing circulation of ideas and younger voices reshaping the region, with cities increasingly sharing knowledge instead of competing.
Drawing on her long experience in the Gulf since 2005, Salem emphasises its plural, diverse, independent scene and sees strong potential for collaboration through knowledge-sharing and capacity building. She calls for deeper engagement with often invisible independent initiatives to better integrate Gulf artists into broader regional networks. If one thread ties Salem’s remarks together, it is her insistence that culture cannot be separated from freedom, not as an abstract value, but as a condition of possibility for artistic life. The commons, in this sense, becomes a way of building structures that protect cultural practice and make it continuous, shared and resilient.
“My fundamental commitment is to defend freedoms and expand their horizons,” she says. “Above all, the highest value for me is freedom: artistic freedom and freedom of expression.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 22 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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