Storytelling shapes and forms our reality. In telling stories we share our experiences across time from one generation to the next. Since the rise of mass produced media, information is the overriding form of communication. Now through global communications, we can also share stories across space from here to yonder. For better or worse, many stories we hear are disseminations of information that are, supposedly, a truthful testimony of what happened. Mediated swarms of images and relentless snippets of information come our way through internet, print, and TV. All these form a great deal of our local and global experience of the world. Yet such global news flashes, online editorials or documentaries are stripped of ambiguity and modified according to a particular political frame of interest. What we hear and see through big media channels about the Middle-East for instance often perpetuate black and white perspectives thus neglecting the complexity and value of personal experience and the nuanced dynamics of a certain culture.

Artists at odds with the simplistic narratives generated by the mass media are seeking ways to are explore new ways of storytelling. Presenting counter narratives that express questions and interpretations beyond the assumed perspectives posited by the mass media landscape. Many artists in Lebanon in particular are regenerating the region’s rich tradition of storytelling by using video as a means to share stories that offer an alternative route back towards daily life, as a place of possibility rather than a life renegaded by one-liner headlines. In the last few years, Lebanon-based artists are developing an unprecedented use of video to construct narratives that incorporate different artistic disciplines from visual arts, to new media and performing arts. The development of these new forms of video practice disavows the dominant media discourse. Their work portrays and makes public a desire to find other and previously unheard of voices beyond generalised categories of political representation. These artists do not show a political identity but rather the different facets of individual stories that ruminate in the untold differences between politcs and identity.

“If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs.
Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is becuase no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.” — From ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations by Walter Benjamin