Nuqat launches Regional Conference 2019
Experts debate on ‘new mindset for old barriers’
By Cinatra Alvares
KUWAIT CITY, Nov 23: Nuqat, the leading pan-Arab non-profit organisation for cultural development based in Kuwait, marked its ten-year anniversary and launched its Regional Conference 2019 on Thursday morning at the Amricani Cultural Centre under the theme ‘State of the Elastic Mind: A New Mindset for Old Barriers’.
The flagship conference is one of the largest multifaceted cultural events taking place in the Middle East, and it comes as part of Nuqat’s regional three-year research tour to set a vision of a creative economy. The conference kicks off with three days of lectures, talks and discussion panels bringing together innovative thinkers, creatives, activists, and policy makers from all over the Arab world to engage in a multidisciplinary dialogue that encompasses art, culture, architecture, design, technology, social and environmental issues with the aim of cultivating creative development in the Middle East.
Nuqat Co-founder and General Director Wakim Zeidan, said: “The 2019 conference is a culmination of Nuqat’s three-year research tour to understand and research the state of the Creative Economy in the Middle East. The main outcome of the research was that in order to define the Creative Economy, the Arab region needs to establish a new mindset to solve its problems.”
Discussion
He continued, “The discussion aims to cover; why we should engage in understanding and critiquing our mindsets, where can the future take us if we change our mindsets, and look at how rewiring the mindset can yield pragmatic approaches. Our personal obstacles lie in learning and growing as individuals. We would like to motivate attendees to embrace self-compassion and understand the importance of emotional intelligence. Social obstacles affect collective society. We are going to dissect age-old social stigmas and cultural norms. We’re aiming to crush the collective fear of failure and experimentation, and give attendees the tools they need to overcome it. Finally, structural obstacles include bureaucratic governmental and legislative policies, inter and intra-nation dynamics, and our physical environment. We will instigate conversations and critique the mindsets that have shaped the current institutions around us in hopes of creating reform”.
Commenting further on the positive social impact of their activities, Zeidan said: “Over the past ten years, our conferences have been the highlight of the cultural happenings in the region. Each conference explored a central idea, exposing the public to an empowering paradigm shift that positively impacted the MENA region. As a result, we have amassed expertise and extensive knowledge of the region’s cultural scene. This knowledge base empowers us to develop groundbreaking content for the progress of the GCC”.
Mind
The first day of the lecture, centered around the ‘Why?’ kicked off with a series of lectures, talks and discussion panels making the case for an elastic mind. In the opening lecture, Fadi Zaghmout, gender activist, blogger and author, posed the question, “Can gender be divided per height?”. Our most accepted human division is genderbased. We create two human kinds based on a single attribute division and then we divide other human attributes and social roles based on the same division. In his talk, he delved into the concept of gender by taking a closer look at his novel, the Bride of Amman in which he imagined a divide based on another human attribute such as height to see how different the world can be. He pointed out that while discussions around gender are at the forefront of society today, many are not able to distinguish between meanings of gender and sex. He shared any social discrimination be it on the basis of colour and complexion, religion, race or ethnicity – facilitates greater privileges to one category over the other. Societies penalize deviations from the ‘rules’ that are so often set by society itself and not mandated by nature. The only way to confront dominant cultures in the fight for social justice is to forego these arbitrary divides in recollection of a collective humanity.
Next, Mohammad Al Suwaidan, assistant professor at Kuwait University and the Univeristy of Toronto, presented an illuminating talk titled, “The Elastic Brain: Creativity’s Spring”. He started with the story of Phineas Gage, who miraculously made a full recovery from a terrible accident of an iron rod going through his head, albeit with a few behavioral changes. There was a belief that our personalities, the way we act, our beliefs and our thoughts, are somehow separate from the material brain. Dr Al Suwaidan pointed out that this was one of the cases that proved that the brain is the mind and the mind is the brain. He emphasized the positive aspect of this story that Gage was able to walk and talk despite destroying 25% of his brain tissue, which speaks to the fact that the brain was able to hack other pathways and reconnect in a way to allow him to function despite the personality change.
Al Suwaidan disputed several myths about the brain that are held very strongly in society. First, that we only use 10% of our brains at any one time, or that once brain cells die no new brain cells can be made, or once neuro-connections are severed, no neural connections can be made. Another commonly held myth is that scientifically minded and logical types are left brained while creatives are right brained. In the last two decades, neuroscience has been revolutionized by the understanding that the brain is neither static nor dynamic, but it is very elastic.
He shared that in April 2013, the US government undertook the Brain Research through applied innovative neuro-technologies. The stated goal of this project is to map the entire connectome of the human brain, every single connection. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on this project so far, with USD 400 million spent in this year alone.“What has astounded everyone is that the amount of data coming out of just attempting to study the connection of the human brain has bankrupted our ability store this data. So far, the number of data coming out of this project per year, is equal to a staggering 300 exabytes. An exabyte is 1000,000 terabytes.”
This, Al Suwaidan noted, shows that the brain is astounding in its complexity and it is the greatest supercomputer ever. While computers today are excellent, they are constrained by their binary signaling. However, the brain uses electro-chemical signaling system. “As an electrical signal passes along one of the neurons to connect to another neuron, it doesn’t need to jump the gap electrically, rather a chemical messenger jumps the gap – known as synapse and we have these neurotransmitters, and because at every single junction, the neurotransmitters can change in type and amount in the receptors, it shows that there is a diverse way in which the signal can be properly communicated.”
One of the speakers at the event.
and beyond that the brain is limitless, unbounded in creativity, and it is elastic”, he concluded.
Haifa Al Anjari, Dean at the College of Fashion and Design, in her talk on Sustainable Fashion, explored the fashion industry as a part and parcel of issues pertaining to water wastage, pollution, deforestation, animal deaths, over mining, etc, through sustainable practice. “We spend a lot of time in the malls, fashion is very important in our lives. Many people are spending time on social media to know what is trending. We have become slaves to fashion. But behind the glitz and glamour is a dark side of fashion”, she stated, pointing to the negative impact of fast fashion on the environment and people involved in the bottom rungs of the industry.
She highlighted three points of why fashion manufacturing has become a catastrophe, who caused it, and what is the role of the consumer in Kuwait? She noted that before the age of fast fashion, designers would take over a year to come up with designs, get prototypes and manufacture their offerings, but today fast fashion can be produced in a week in times of a quick order. “Ideas take time but plagiarism is cheap”, she remarked.
Valued at USD 2.5 trillion dollar, the fast fashion industry is concerned only with the accumulation of money. She informed that 8 out of the 55 richest people in the world are trading in fashion. difference. Through joint collaboration and dialogue, sustainable fashion can benefit everyone who is involved in the industry from the farmer all the way to the consumer.
Lecture
Journalist and Editor, Haifa Zeaiter, in her lecture “The Power of Blind Faith”, pointed out that before trying to change mindsets, we must ask ourselves how do you approach someone and open the door for discussion before trying to fill up the gap present between us? She started her talk with a video of a dancer turning on her toes, seen by the audience to be moving in clockwise, anti-clockwise and sometimes in both directions. This visual deception is used by sociologists to demonstrate how people looking at the same thing can perceive it differently. The first factor determining our perception is how the brain functions itself, she affirmed.
Zeaiter shared images disseminated on social media pointing to drug usage to demonize the current protests in Lebanon. But the acceptance of whether these images reflect the facts on the ground is found in the motivated reasoning of the viewer. She stated that people will accept the facts based on their own personal leanings and motivations to support what they believe in. “We seek the evidence that supports our facts and beliefs”, she remarked.
Speaking on cognitive dissonance, she shared that the discomfort of confronting believed untruths keeps us from exploring the other perspective. This is seen in the media consumption preferences of people that line up with their political affiliations and beliefs. Relativism is also a theory supported in the first part of the 20th century which contends that there is no absolute truth, but relative. Relativism in the postmodernism world was normal and natural in policies and social sciences but is problematic within the sphere of scientific knowledge.
In a post-truth world, determined by factors of echo rooms supported by social media and the wisdom of algorithms, we live in bubbles of thought that keep us from dissuading from the group. Facts are not necessarily stronger than attitudes and beliefs therefore there is a need to build the right response from consumers of news, she warned. The line of demarcation between doubting everything and skepticality is open dialogue.
She discussed the positive outcome of Raseef22, an online magazine, and similar media experiments as they are independent from any political agendas and narrow interests, allowing the opportunity for reader engagement. After achieving this, the efforts can be focused on how to address readers from different cultures, conditions, experiences and locations, and the tools to use, whether in discussions regarding revolutions, personal freedoms, religious discourse and its reform, or popular culture and its categories.
Transformations
In the next talk, titled, “The Two Futures of the Arab World”, essayist and columnist Tarek Osman pointed out that as the Arab world is going through major transformations, those changes have created a window of opportunity that could change the way we operate socially, politically, and economically. While wars, polarization, conflicts, and unrest are labeled “disasters” they also bring with them hope. He discussed changing the way we perceive these transformations as it will allow us to re-frame the way we look at failure. All the events happening at the moment in the Arab World can be seen as opportunities to engage parts of the wider demographic that have often been spoken about, mainly the youth, but who hardly ever truly get the chance to, more than speak, actually act.
Rand Abdul Jabbar gave a presentation titled, ‘Minaret of ‘Anah’, in which she narrated the cycles of re-birth that the ‘Anah Minaret has undergone throughout its history and explore artistic intervention as a potential tool of perseverance against the forces threatening to destroy cultural and architectural heritage across the region. Situated in Western Iraq, believed to date back to the Uqaylid dynasty, the structure had a tragic history of being relocated in the 1980s, destroyed by a terrorist explosion in 2006, and rebuilt in 2012 only to be destroyed again in 2016 by ISIS militias.
The first day of the conference also included two discussion panels. The first, ‘Mind the Gap’ was moderated by Tariq Khawaji and included Fadi Zaghmout, Khadija Al Shammari and Imran Al Dabbagh as panelists. They reflected upon how social norms and customs have created rigid stereotypes that place people into boxes thus leaving no room for change, creating a gap between reality and perception. The panel also dissected and discussed the social expectations that have been constructed and how they dictate almost every aspect of our lives, how these expectations lead us consciously or unconsciously to discriminate and alienate those who fall in the gap.
The second discussion panel titled, ‘Romanticizing History’, was moderated by Asseel Al Ragam and examined our perspective and relationship with the past, looking into how much does changing the way we look at history have a direct impact on the future and why are we romanticizing nostalgia and in what ways does it hold us back. The panelists included Sharifa Al Shalfan, Laila Al Hamad and George Azar.
The three days of talks and lectures will be followed by seven days of cultural workshops conducted for different age groups, as well as musical performances, art exhibitions, poetry and several other forms of cultural entertainment. Nuqat’s website, www.nuqat.me, can be accessed for free registration with limited seating.