"Form, ForEx, Family: Black Market Economies and the Architecture of Social Credit in Libya" by Moad Musbahi

Date: 

Thursday, October 21, 2021, 2:00pm to 3:30pm

Location: 

Online

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The Tunisia Office of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University

presents: “The Urban in North Africa”

A Webinar Series Prepared and Moderated by Myriam Amri

Session 4:

Form, ForEx, Family: Black Market Economies and the Architecture of Social Credit in Libya

With:

Moad Musbahi, Independent Researcher and Artist

In Dialogue with Myriam Amri, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, Harvard University

Thursday, October 21, 2021

  PLEASE NOTICE THE ORIGINAL TIME OF THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CHANGED TO:   

02:00-3:30 PM (EST) // 7:00-8:30 PM (Tunis)

Online. Register in advance for this webinar here: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4sVNj5WpR_Ce2PJGW9LlCg

 

About the guest speaker:

Moad Musbahi is an independent researcher and artist currently based in Tunis. He is co-directing the roaming research programme ‘Taught to Travel’ with the Harun Farocki Institut on the relation between pedagogy, migration and media archives across Alexandria, Beirut, Berlin, Dakar and Tunis. Moad is an external advisor for Bain & Company; a recipient of the Sharjah Art Foundation Production Programme grant (2020); the EU’s ‘All Around Culture’ Research Grant (2021); and the Goethe Institut’s Visual Arts Project Fund (2021). Previously, he worked with the DLX Design Lab at the University of Tokyo as a researcher at the Royal College of Art’s School of Architecture, London, and has been a recent resident at Gasworks, a non-profit contemporary visual art organization London (2021).

In this talk, Moad Musbahi explores the administrative logic of the family and how it plays a crucial role in the arbitrage of economic policy in Libya; it is a logic that predated the 2011 regime change, and continues since, and where finance is instrumentalized through a carefully considered bureaucracy and spatialisation of social relations.

About The Urban in North Africa webinar series:

This lecture series is an interdisciplinary discussion platform to hear from scholars, artists, and filmmakers who think with and about urban spaces in North Africa. The series aims to showcase an expansive definition of the “urban” in the region, to examine changing cities, scapes, spaces, and sites, and highlight the various social phenomena that make the complex urban fabric of the region. We seek to locate how the urban is both the setting of transformation in the region and the object of transformation by discussing works that address subject-formations, political economy, spatial practices, and the environment. While urban spaces have long been at the forefront of projects of thought and of creative practices in the region, this series considers the urban “otherwise”, as ripped with intimate affects, political upheavals, and global capitalist transformations. What does it mean to see urban spaces in North Africa as sites of and for theoretical and aesthetic practices?

Questions: cmes_tunisia@fas.harvard.edu.

 

The talk will be conducted in English. Persons with disabilities who wish to request digital accessibility to this event, please contact cmes-tunisia@fas.harvard.edu in advance of the session.