Beirut doesn’t pretend. It cracks open the conversation before you even start talking. That’s what makes it the right place for something like Creative Dialogues (site), a roving, regional platform that brings together artists, designers, students, researchers, curators, and cultural workers from across the Arab world. Their aim is to foster real, interdisciplinary conversations; the kind that rarely happen in conventional, institutional settings.
Back in the city this September after their 2023 debut, the platform isn’t posturing as a conference or networking event. Each edition centres on localized, site-responsive programming: student-led installations, late-night roundtables, cross-border workshops, and shared meals that deliberately blur hierarchies between “emerging” and “established,” between the academic and the lived.
The three-day program (September 12-14) unfolds across the LAU campus, Beit Beirut, and Bossa Nova Hotel, where the city’s texture bleeds into the conversations. LAU’s student-led kick-off centres nature and the man-made, steering the conversation away from online aesthetics and back toward how we live, work, and relate to space. Beirut is a contradiction; worn and electric, heavy with memory and still bursting with creative heat. It’s a place that doesn’t pretend things are okay, and that makes it the perfect setting for real dialogue, and for exclusive student exhibitions like Majal Design School’s ‘Beirut Visualised, Beirut Reimagined’.
At Bossa Nova Hotel, the exhibition Beirut Visualised, Beirut Reimagined brings together eleven textile students from Majal Design School, each responding to the city’s layered and contradictory realities through woven installations. Each student selected a fragment of Beirut (physical or emotional) and translated it into texture, tension, and colour. The result is a visual field of electric wires, fabric remnants, soft threads, and hard truths.
Weaving is used not just as a technique, but as a language. In their hands, it becomes a way of navigating the push-pull between beauty and fatigue, nostalgia and critique. Rather than offering a unified narrative, the works embrace ambiguity. Some reflect the density of daily life in the city, others take on a quieter, more introspective tone. Together, they don’t present a fixed identity for Beirut; they expose its frayed edges and enduring patterns.
This exhibition isn’t a side note within Creative Dialogues. It forms part of the architecture. It shows how design students can lead a conversation not just about aesthetics, but about place. And in a programme rooted in horizontality, these works don’t feel like student projects, they feel like contributions to an ongoing, collective reimagining of Beirut itself.
Creative Dialogues isn’t interested in being an “incubator.” It’s not here to mine talent. It’s here to connect it. From curated breakfast experiences by Josephine set within a pop-up flower market, to cross-border talks at Fleurs du Liban, the goal is to build something horizontal. Over at Beit Beirut, architect Hala Younes and cultural platform Hkeeli co-curate a series of cross-disciplinary talks and activations. The platform also leans into softness and slowness, like guided city tours by Samira of Layers for Lebanon, and a walk through the Nuha Saud Pavilion offer pauses in the program.
There’s no velvet rope. Students sit beside urbanists. Artists riff off researchers. A flower grower from rural Lebanon might end up sharing a table with a Saudi curator. They’re more so encounters rather than panels. Maybe the most radical thing about Creative Dialogues is that it doesn’t treat creativity like content. It treats it like infrastructure, something that needs support, time, and reciprocity.
Creative Dialogues was never meant to be a one-off. It works like a cultural baton pass; handing the mic across cities, disciplines, and generations. From student-made installations to late-night roundtables, the focus isn’t on who’s trending; it’s on who’s building. Slowly, honestly, collaboratively.
Future editions in Cairo, Riyadh, Muscat, and Marrakesh suggest a vision that’s less centralized. It’s not about planting a flag. It’s about tending to creative ecosystems that already exist, and giving them room to grow.
Creative Dialogues doesn’t promise to fix anything, but it is making space for things to unfold, slowly and imperfectly. And right now, that feels like the most honest starting point we’ve got.
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