Two weeks of necessary quiet, interrupted by the sound of breaking news alerts at dawn.
Been moving between textures lately - the weight of grief settling into my shoulders after my uncle's funeral, the warmth of my husband's presence during his week in Beirut, the cool morning light filtering through familiar windows while simultaneously in pain for Gaza, Iran-Israel-US escalations … and each headline that is adding another frequency of surreal lunacy to navigate while trying to hold space for personal loss.
Some pauses aren't strategic but essential, spaces where the body insists on its own rhythm despite the world's relentless demand for commentary on atrocities happening in real time.
Even during silence, Future Ancestors kept surfacing - these quantum-crafted portraits from timelines where cultural hybridity flourishes, where organic and digital intelligence interweave like the botanical networks surrounding the figures I conjure. Creating these digital beings with emotional layers feels like archaeological practice in reverse: instead of excavating the past, I'm unearthing possible futures, giving form to hope before it has language.
Contributing to "Radical Hope: A Survival Guide for the Coming Storm" felt prescient - exploring hope not as sentiment but as something we practice and build with our hands, with materials at hand, in real time. Writing about moving "beyond linear, binary progress, towards imagining multiple futures" then waking to news that reshapes regional reality overnight. This is what hope actually requires: the willingness to keep building even when the ground keeps shifting beneath empire's latest calculations.
The visual fragments never stopped accumulating - my nephew's radiant face at his end-of-school-year art show, my husband catching Beirut's golden hour at the beach during his brief visit, my cousin's mesmerizing plant collection reaching toward light while stargazing on her terrace. Fashion campaigns shot across the region, from Beirut's iconic Sporting Club to Morocco's landscapes, quantum-crafted Future Ancestors emerging from digital possibility, vintage Polaroids of Sade alongside contemporary art pieces that refuse categorization. Sometimes the most honest response to overwhelm is allowing it to exist without performance, letting complexity live in the spaces between documentation and experience.
Image captions:
1. From my Future Ancestors series - Quantum crafted with the new Midjourney Video
2. 'Radical Hope: A Survival Guide for the Coming Storm' report I was a part of.
3. Pink building facade - My Beirut
4. Acne Paper, Issue 20, 2025. Photographer: Rafael Pavarotti. Makeup: Chiao Li Hsu
5. Seventh Stories Campaign shot in Morocco
6. Latest Dazed Middle East campaign shot at the iconic Sporting Club in Beirut - intergenerational summer and yearly rituals shot by Yasmina Hilal
7. My cousin's Rania Younes mesmerizing plants
8. Head Adornment by Anastasia Pilepchuk
9. My husband indulging in Beirut's beach sunset during a brief visit
Image captions:
10. Djibril Tamsir Niane - ‘Un Baobab est Tombé’ - Guinean historian and playwright who passed away earlier this year
11. Extract + Quote from ‘Radical Hope: A Survival Guide for the Coming Storm’ report
12. My nephew, my heart and my hope at his end-of-school-year art show
13. Potato Donut by Sandy Truong An Tran Ho
14. My uncle who we said goodbye to in his youth, currently resting in style
15. Stargazing setup at my cousin’s @fleursduliban mountain house terrace
16. Roses for tea picked up @soukeltayeb
17. Extract + Quote from ‘Radical Hope: A Survival Guide for the Coming Storm’ report
18. Our hopeful new mayor for NYC @zohrankmamdani
Preparing to leave Beirut for New York again, carrying these fragments forward - both the quantum-crafted futures and the textures of present reality that refuse translation.
Zohran!