Alia Alzougbi is Artistic Drector and CEO at Shubbak Festival. Her work sits in the intersection of art and social and environmental justice. In her work, she uses the arts to interrogate the fundamental causes of inequality and explore alternative modes of understanding the world and being in it, foregrounding dignity for all beings and Earth, our only home. She has worked with national and international organisations as an artist and storyteller to create critical encounters in education and the arts towards collective liberation, from local corner shops to world-renowned museums. Ahead of her participation in the Jornadas de Inclusión Social in Tenerife, we spoke to her to ask her about her work and expectations during the event.
For anyone unfamiliar with it, could you please describe what Shubbak Festival is, how it was created and what your mission is?
Shubbak is a UNESCO award-winning festival of contemporary Arab & SWANA culture and the largest of its kind in Europe. Our mission is to bring the best of Arab/SWANA arts and culture to audiences in the UK and internationally. Our programme spans multiple art forms, including theatre, music, dance, literature, visual art, and interdisciplinary performance, showcasing bold new work from across the region and its diasporas. Outside of the festival years, we run a rich year-round programme of community engagement, artist development, residencies, and touring work.
Shubbak was founded in 2011 by the Mayor’s Office in the Greater London Authority. The festival was originally planned as a one-off event to take place in the summer of 2011, six months after the Arab Spring. Following that, a group of key individuals in the London Arab cultural sector decided that there was a need for a more sustained and urgent dialogue and presence of Arab artists and culture in London and aimed to develop the project into a biennial festival. The organisation was registered as a charitable company, with the first independent festival taking place in July 2013. It has taken place on a biennial basis ever since.
What was your first encounter with Shubbak festival and how did you end up joining the festival’s team?
I attended the festival in its first iteration as a recently-arrived young artist trying to make my way in a competitive, non-representative cultural landscape. As a migrant, I didn't understand how things worked and the opportunities that were available to artists like me were few and far between. In 2015, I was invited to perform at the festival and this emboldened me to propose other shows I was producing. In 2019, I was invited to produce one of Shubbak's in-house commissions, bringing me even closer to the team. Then, in 2021, I applied for the directorship position and have been tasked with overseeing the organisation artistically and strategically ever since.
Your work often sits in the intersection of art, social justice, and environmental justice. Could you share with us an example of how these three themes come together in your curatorial or organisational practice at Shubbak?
This is a really important question for me, especially in this moment. For so many of our communities, sitting in grief and rage, it’s hard to fathom how the world has been withstanding the violence being unleashed onto the Arab & SWANA region — how the world continues in spite of the loss of lives, lands and livelihoods. Last year I had to really confront the question of what it means to hold a festival in the midst of a genocide in Gaza, ecocide in South Lebanon, unspeakable violence in Sudan. I won't deny that, confronted with devastation at an unimaginable scale, my conviction in art was shattered into skepticism. What can a festival do?
Like so many others I'm still grappling with those questions but I return, yet again, to the principle of art as resistance. As archive. As insistence that no lives should be reduced to insignificance. And this is a thread that runs through both our organisational and curatorial practices at Shubbak. We're working hard to build day-to-day policies, procedures and ways of working that centre people and planet. What this means is that we turn our values into actions. So for instance, we value community so we build in methodologies to share power with our communities through juries, advisory groups, ensuring young people are on our board, listening sessions. We value learning, so we know that we must be humble when we listen, that we may never have it all figured out, that this is generational work and we are its custodians for now. We value the Earth, our only home, so our ethical fundraising policy has red lines about who we do and don't take money from.
Curatorially, I believe passionately in the role of art in dreaming in the world we want to see and I'm excited by works that love fiercely, dream unapologetically, and hold steadfast in our belief that another world is possible, and that at the root of this possibility is our entanglement with each other across borders, both tangible and imagined, and not just in our region but across the world, and with the Earth, our only home. So I will weave together a digital piece rooted in action today like An Artist's Manual Against Apartheid by Farah Chamma and LIEV with an futurism piece like Limbs of the Lunar Disc by Sarah Al Sarraj, which conjures up new worlds rooted in temporal realities. Both are important and speak to each other urgently about the action we take today and the possibility of imagination to engineer us toward alternative futures.
So for me art holds messy, bitter hope in the midst of destruction. Art is not an exercise in isolation — it is the very seed that determines the DNA of the dream that we can do better, we can imagine a better world, and we can rehearse, today, to start bringing that world in.
In 2021 the festival’s name changed from “A window on contemporary Arab culture” to “A window from contemporary Arab cultures”. Why was this a significant change for the festival in terms of representation?
When I stepped into post in 2021 it felt crucial to pluralise the cultures of the Arab world. Shubbak's strapline used to read 'A window on contemporary Arab culture.' But we are not a homogeneous people -- we are a multi-verse of societies, practices, cuisines, languages and the term 'Arab' erases cultures in the region that don't identify as such and flattens the diverse ways of life that can often sit in contradiction with one another. So that representation of pluralism felt important.
Then our Executive Director, Dima Mekdad, brought up the important question around the 'gaze', shifting the focus from being looked on through a window, to the window being the frame through which we project our multiplicity cultures on our communities' terms. It shifts our position powerfully from being one where we are being gazed at, to active agents who are the decision makers determining the direction of the gaze.
This year, the main themes during the Jornadas de Inclusión Social are mobility and displacement. How do you think these themes are present or interpreted in the work that you promote at Shubbak Festival?
These themes are very real in our work, from the time, money and labour that go into visa applications, to the cost of flying (both financially & environmentally) to the politics of borders (which bodies get to traverse which borders and which bodies remain enclosed). As a diasporic organisation, migration is a central theme to our work -- indeed, it is a lived reality for us as staff who are first-generational Arab & SWANA migrants in the UK. Operationally, visa refusals are a day-to-day reality we have to live with and the impact of that is that some shows don't make it to the festival and that is devastating for artists and has real implications for them financially and in terms of their ability to build a career too. We have to keep speaking up about this issue, and it takes so much capacity for a small organisation like ours that already punches above its weight.
As for displacement, the number of displaced artists we have worked with over the years are too many to count. But especially at a time when narratives can be so divisive, racist and inhumane across the globe, our work is about re-igniting people's awareness that human movement, whether by choice or not, is as old as time. Ultimately, our festival is about storytelling, and the story we tell is one that challenges stereotypes, offers alternative viewpoints and stands up for human (and beyond human) dignity.
Thinking about mobility, movement and migration, in what ways has Shubbak festival allowed you to connect with artists, curators, institutions globally? Have these international connections included Spain?
Leading an international festival means that I regularly encounter artists, curators, and institutions from very different contexts. It is humbling every time. We may all be striving for similar things, but the way concepts or ideals manifest in different contexts are a critical wake-up call to the many paths we walk. I value these conversations every time -- they are crucial to the process of unlearning and a reminder that no one size fits all.
Spain holds a special place in my heart, especially these days. As an independent artist and producer, I brought a staged reading of the book Syria Speaks to Casa Arabe in Madrid. More recently, I was invited by British Council to chair a panel on Inclusion at Mondiacult which took place in Barcelona.
Looking towards your participation during the Jornadas in Tenerife, what do you hope to gain from this experience?
To learn, to listen and to be humbled! To be exposed to different perspectives, different realities and different understandings whilst also sharing my own critical views, beliefs and lived experience. That is the beauty of gathering around a purpose and a theme.