Siwar Krai(y)tem
Siwar Krai(y)tem is a multilingual designer, researcher, writer, and artist based between Beirut and Amsterdam. Her research and artistic practice focuses on multilingualism and language in times of transformation, as well as the construction of society through language. Since May 2021, she has co-curated the platform Latlateh (which translates from Arabic to mean “unmeaningful chatter”), an encounter-based platform which focuses on language and the power plays embedded in language, semantics, translation, and daily conversation.
She is currently a participant in Mophradat’s New Agents Program, a collective online residency where six cultural workers from the Arab world attempt to answer the question: “What do we need for the future?” She is also assistant coordinator at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam’s Design Department. In December 2022, she began a writing commission with publisher Unformed Informed, where she writes a diary-like series on her evolving relationship with Arabic, her mother tongue, after three years of being in the Netherlands. She is also part of the BAK Cell, Utrecht, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice.
During the fellowship, she questions whether it is possible to be in alignment in a multilingual world. She also explores questions of privilege, hierarchy, and precarity when it comes to language, reflecting on multilingualism and society and the ways in which it creates alignment and non-alignment, as well as tools of social negotiation and ways to create better alignment.