Realizing Community
Applications of Care to Cultural Production
by Dayna Ash*
Since not many of us are able, nor are afforded the same privileges, access, and space as others, it became clear that we must tear down the gates built to keep us out and reshape our own environments.
Haven for Artists, founded in 2011, is a cultural feminist non-profit based in Beirut, Lebanon. Working at the intersection of art and activism, Haven has a cultural centre and acts as a digital platform supporting artistic expression and production rooted in intersectional feminist thinking and decolonial practices. We host and produce cultural events and exhibitions, festivals, clubs, workshops panels, creative campaigns, and cultural publications.
Upon its inception, Haven’s intent was to connect and create a platform that enables collaboration rather than competition in a country maligned with oppression, silencing and erasure. We began with the slogan, for the arts and by the arts, to share the stage, share the resources, knowledge, art, culture, and the audience. To grow slowly and remould ourselves into whatever the community requires.
It took a lot of free labour or the labour of love, sometimes to the detriment of our ability to pay rent; many of us worked multiple jobs, but Haven’s events were our way of expressing, and creating. It was our way of existing outside of a system that forced us to produce for profit rather than for people. In the specific context of Lebanon, it was a form of resistance as the system still criminalises queer bodies, censors’ freedom of expression, relegates women to second class citizens and fails in offering financial or structural support to cultural practices and individuals alike.
We work diligently to raise donations and apply/secure funding to ensure and sustain the centre, so that we may offer free workshops, screenings, talks, while covering the facilitators fees who are part of the community themselves. In tandem to the running of the space, and in line with our belief in anti-gatekeeping and in a feminist economy, we share resources, knowledge, art, and culture by supporting grassroots initiatives and collectives through capacity building, policies, fundraising, visual design campaigns, and creative direction.
Fostering a culture of care, participation and exchange is essential for creating a sustainable and inclusive cultural space. By challenging current structures and promoting more equitable practices, activists, artists, and cultural workers can benefit from a more collaborative and supportive environment.
Our responsibilities are the equal dissemination of information, the equitable access to services and support systems and the empowerment of those around us through direct action. I was taught the meaning of community by practising it with others. I am still learning the responsibilities of the individual in taking care of it.
The conversation can never be concluded,
and our doors to different methods and modes can never be closed.
We have all been raised, conditioned, and berated by cis-white-hetero-patriarchy and capitalism – the weapons that maintain hierarchy and power, that make up and malign our sense of self and of community. All of us have been taught and trained to strive for the individual’s success, to take and to keep taking for one’s own self-preservation.
So how do we counter the exclusion of so many of us from public spheres? From access to education? How do we share the wealth of knowledge and the abundance of experience we gain? How do we overcome the rising restrictions and resist? How can we come together to respond to the many crises we are grappling with daily? What tools already exist? What knowledge has been erased? How can we unlearn and relearn so that we may heal and grow?
Our connection, and collaboration is a powerful and frightening confrontation to those that hold the power, wealth and withhold the land. Oppression is rooted in hierarchy, supremacy, hate, greed, and segregation, so it is only normal to believe that the greatest tool against it would be the radical opposite. Love, care, inclusivity, generosity, and horizontality. Where we stand today, with agency, empowered and resolute, is due to a path weaved by those that taught us, shared with us, held us and in turn, saved us from the same fate. These acts that felt so gentle and fleeting soon became solid bricks under each step we took and still take. The networks of support sprout from the belief that kindness is an act and care is framework that evolves and expands. One that is limitless in form and bountiful in source, that time and time again has mended, inspired, and embraced us.
Haven for Artists registered as an organisation in 2017, evolving into a community-driven centre that fosters creativity, inclusivity, and social awareness. Throughout the first six years we hosted pop-up events across the city that acted as a platform for artists to showcase their work, to meet and build bonds.
It was an idea that many people watered, nourished, gave time to and instilled love in. Haven could never belong to any one person completely, as pieces of it lie with every person that made it ever growing, making it into what it is and what it is becoming. It created a sense of shared responsibility and collective ownership that helped to strengthen our community and build trust and solidarity.
12 years later, it continues as such.
Haven has opened 3 free cultural centres. As a community, the first two operated without any funding.
Artists lived, ate, and slept as they built the first Haven house. All of us gave time, effort, dreams, material, wood, screws, nails and persistence. It served primarily as an art hub, a space where artists were supported and encouraged by an interdependent community. We had 2 artists in residence at a time along with hosting workshops, talks, screenings, having a free workspace, spoken word events, and listening sessions.
From 2015 to 2017 the first house hosted 96 events, while the collective hosted two large festivals, Autumn Sonata: as the leaves fall and Radical: Choix et Conséquences.
“Concept 2092” was Haven’s second creative hub project, as the first space was no longer able to fulfil the need for more space and expanding services such as a shelter for LGBTQI+ individuals and an artist residency programme. We used these spaces also to host cultural, civil, and social initiatives through open discussions, civic engagement campaigns, and collaborations with other local organisations and activists in the field.
From 2017 till 2019, the second house (Concept 2092) hosted 124 events, while the collective hosted 2 international exhibitions and a local exhibition, “Vices and validation”,with 38 participating artists that identified as women.
In October 2019, the Lebanese revolution erupted due to the financial crisis and over 30 years of layered and staggering political corruption, austerity, interventionism, recession, Sectarianism and unemployment among many others. Haven as an organisation went on strike, yet we opened our doors to collectives, activists, and artists who used the space to meet, connect, mobilise, and plan the next course of action. Our resources and creative abilities were now used in support of the protests and in support of the revolution, while we as individuals took to the frontlines and against riot shields.
In 2020 I had written a play tackling identity, freedom, and queer being in the Middle East, entitled “Courage”. The play was intended to premiere as the city raged with the revolution and the world shuttered in by the pandemic. As a play was no longer fitting of the time and space, I reached out to the Haven community of artists to come together to adapt it into an experimental film. “Courage”, with its diverse team, wanted to deconstruct and create an alternative to the dominating discourse that promoted coming out of the closet as the desired goal, to the exclusion of those, who through a courageous act themselves, do not come out.
Following the August 4th Beirut port Blast, Haven morphed once again and turned its offices into a shelter. We raised 103 thousand dollars in direct cash and rent relief, that was distributed across our community.
Regardless of our mission as an organisation, we are community members, first.
As distributions continued into 2021, the team and artists launched launched Moulding the lost space / قولبة المساحة المفقودة, a digital exhibition that asked marginalised artists in Beirut to reflect on the aftereffects of the lockdown and the Blast on our spatial surroundings, on the boundaries of the physical space and its impact on identity.
The current and 3rd Haven house, with its beautiful garden, opened in February of 2022, where we continue to promote collaboration and non-competitive environments.
Throughout the years, we grew from the abundance of wealth shared with us by the incredible activists, feminists, and artists that we’ve met along the way. Many have become friends, mentors, and partners. People that shared their truth and enabled us to find our own. The willingness to grow with one another and to learn from each other taught us the power of knowledge when shared and the power of sharing.
“There is no liberation, without community” – Audre Lord
*
Dayna Ash is an intersectional feminist, performing artist, published writer, playwright, and the founder & Executive Director of Haven for Artists; a cultural feminist organization working at the intersection of art and activism. Dayna is an auto-dictate academic whose work in advocacy and arts is rooted in intersectional and de-colonial practices for the creation of alternative structures and a community-based approach to fighting injustice and oppression.
She is the Intersectional Feminism Advocacy Fellow at The Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut, and is the Arts for Gender Fellow for Care USA and The Rockefeller Foundation. She currently serves on Global Fund for Women Board of Directors and as a SheDecides Champion.
Dayna was named one of the BBC's 100 most inspirational Women in 2019, awarded the Woman of Distinction award in 2020 by the NGO Committee on the Status of Women, and Leader in LGBT Health Equity award from the Lebanese Medical Association for Sexual Health in 2021 for advancing LGBTQ wellbeing in Lebanon.
Courage, a film Dayna wrote and produced, directed by Malak Mroueh won Best Experimental Film in Montreal Independent film festival in 2022 and in Berlin Indie Film Festival in 2021. Dayna was the Cultural Delegate for Momentum in the Edinburgh Festivals Cultural Diplomacy program in 2022. She also served on the Artist Changemaker Advisory Council for the Global Fund for Women in 2022, and as a member of the Review Committee for the The Doria Feminist Fund.
