I became politicized in the early 2000s through queer, leftist circles in Beirut, alongside alternative Armenian and feminist political spaces. We gathered in houses and bars, or we met in discreet locations that required informal vetting. When we took to the streets, it was about connecting with people in their own neighborhoods, encouraging them to join public meetings and marches. Organizing was rooted in trust and built slowly through face-to-face relationships. Activists didn’t just show up. They were usually invited by someone already trusted within the group, or they were subjected to a screening process prior to admission. These experiences grounded my understanding of political work as something embodied and relational, where trust, accountability, and care are the preconditions of organizing.  

By the late 2010s, social media became increasingly central to how I followed and felt part of a geopolitical discourse, but the deep sense of connection and trust that had sustained my earlier activism began to dissipate. Then, my immigration to Canada made the absence of connection and presence in political work even more palpable. Alienated and alone in a foreign country during the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Artsakh, and the relentless bombing of Lebanon, I began looking for ways to reconnect to a sense of embodied collectivity, one where my political and cultural work could merge and renew my sense of place.

Engaging with Jayce Salloum’s films at the workshop held at La Lumière Collective, this sense of being together reemerged in a relational space grounded in work around Palestine and the shared reflections that Salloum’s practice made possible. Many of us present in this space came from communities that had lived under systemic violence, or whose histories carried the weight of genocide, land dispossession, and ethnic cleansing. Centering Palestine, these shared yet differently situated experiences transformed the process of meeting into an affective form of recognition that countered the isolation of my displacement. Being in the presence of others who upheld a commitment to a shared struggle seemed to enable a layering of temporalities, where past injustices experienced by my people a century ago could be ever so slightly mended by present solidarities. Being together felt like both a practice of care and a mode of resistance transformed over time. 

While we nurtured this sense of presence in discussions with Salloum about his artistic practice, it was especially untitled part 1: everything and nothing (1999–2001), his interview with Soha Bechara, that invited a recognition of time and memory as a relational experience, shared with others and inseparable from how we witness or express solidarity. Though fraught with geographic and linguistic dislocations, the work deliberately cultivates connection and copresence within fractured spaces. Salloum, a Canadian artist passing through Paris, converses with the Lebanese National Resistance fighter Bechara, who had been detained for ten years, six of them in isolation at the notorious El-Khiyam interrogation center in South Lebanon. Rather than framing Bechara’s testimony within a reductive arc of victimhood or heroism, the film dwells in her pauses, tone, and complexity, allowing the audience to confront the ambiguities of survival and resistance, as something that may not always be clearly communicated or understood.

As the conversation unfolds in Arabic and French and is subtitled in English, it draws attention to an ethics of translation, which fails to transmit through language yet continues to move through the wounds of history without letting them close off the moment of recognition. It is precisely along these lines that I read Soha’s suggestions for the piece to remain untitled or titled only by an interrogation or exclamation mark. At one moment, a cut to black is followed by Soha speaking directly to the camera: “Tu ne comprends pas?” (You don’t understand?), to which Jayce replies, “Je ne comprends pas mais ça va” (I don’t understand, but it’s OK). The exchange reminds me that it is less important to understand every word than it is to recognize the shared urgency to capture that word which exists in a temporal and relational moment, in Bechara’s Paris dorm room, on that day, that month, between those two exact people. A moment that would otherwise remain unwitnessed and be lost if not held attentively. 

UNTITLED PART 1: EVERYTHING AND NOTHING (Jayce Salloum, 1999–2001).

To speak of what is muʾarrakh (recorded in history) is to attend to where we are going. Distance, then, is not simply a matter of kilometers or language; it does not lessen histories of injustice. If it did, as Bechara remarks, the long and often arduous path of resistance and liberation would eventually lose all meaning. The least one can do is preserve one’s humanity, and that preservation comes through empathy with, as well as the emancipation of, others who are, ultimately, oneself. Through its invitation to commune, to resist, and to imagine futures together, the film insists on an ethical mode of presence, one that demands attention, care, and the creation of a communal space where narratives emerge collectively and collaboratively, rather than as didactic content optimized for clicks. 

The absence of scripted questions and narrative arcs in untitled allows for ambiguity, contradiction, and emotion to surface, making room for what official records often exclude. The film relies on an epistemology of experience, reflecting fragmented narratives and overlapping lineages. Its coherence emerges not through tidy beginnings and endings but across pauses, hesitations, and interruptions. Presence, in this sense, is not merely about being seen or recorded, but rather about Salloum’s recognition that bodies carry memory. To sit in a space, to inhabit it, to imbue it with memory, truth, and dissident voices, to share the air, and to embody a political stance and comradeship, is not only a way of being in community and communion, but also a means of countering the dehumanization of being reduced to a singular meaning.

Presence, as Salloum’s work makes clear, is less an aesthetic principle than a relational practice that makes politics possible, one enacted every time people come together to listen, to speak, and to hold space for one another. Gathering with others in a community space (La Lumière) or neighborhood cinema (Cinéma Public) in Montreal was not just an event, but a space of encounter, where fragments of memories, kinship, and those who have been scattered could come together. In a world where ethnonationalism has broken many of our lineages, these encounters stitch together what has been unraveled, creating moments of collective presence and repair. They offer a counterpoint to the alienation and individuation of digital life and organizing, and to my disillusionment with social media, whose emancipatory and revolutionary promises I had once embraced. Salloum’s films, around which we gathered, remind me that the margins are not empty, and that language need not be polished. It is in the interstices, in moments of copresence, clumsiness, and mutual attentiveness, that transformative cultural work can take root. Conversational practices grounded in relationality cultivate vulnerability and empathy, making it possible for beauty and brokenness to coexist, and forming sites of reassembly that dominant academic and cultural institutions can neither anticipate nor contain. Conversation, in this context, is not just a method but a mode of being: a practice through which those living through rupture can speak with, be with, and become with each other, in defiance of systems that silence and alienate, and in service of ongoing resistance and the slow work of repair.