Head(ed)
Coming from a background in science and audiovisual production, Presica Chaar has worked across Lebanon, Iraq, and Turkey in project and grant management, supporting feminist, media, and grassroots groups in complex political and social contexts. Her engagement with civil society has been less about career than about inquiry – a sustained questioning of how structures shape meaning, collaboration, and fatigue. Within that trajectory, she has contributed to research, coordination, and project and strategy design, gradually moving away from iNGO frameworks to work more closely with small collectives and grassroots initiatives concerned with gender, media, and accountability. Her current interests move between film, photography, and critical writing, and through dialectics explore how image and language can hold space for contradiction, fragmentation, and care. Having long navigated the NGO industrial complex and its alienation, she now studies cinema and explores a multidisciplinary visual practice. Presica continues to work between languages and disciplines as a photographer, photojournalist, translator, and writer, seeking forms of collaboration and expression beyond institutional structures.
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Sarah Al-Sarraj - Seed
To Sarah Hijazi
The rhythm of stories
Who of us is writing
is it me or
is it you
I can be a clever fool
Clever foolishness costs me everyone
cost us the land
a full-time wound
compulsive smoking
replacing water with coffee
Music carries us to safety
We fall asleep beside the book
its pages bound by nightmares
Come morning
we wake like stories
to avoid the night,
we become it
we drink gin
snort crushed painkillers
and trade love
a continuous spiral-
the rhythm of reality
like our always-awake minds,
like the moon.
The country
Those bastards ganged up on me
I fell off my bike
and they jumped me
A heart spells
r e d l o v e
A dusty lung
springs into green
Garments carry streets
rebel patiently
A resistant head
head(ed)
registers the pain
Zeinab riding her bike
Flying
From home to the street
From the street to the neighborhood
From the neighborhood to the mountains
From the mountains to the library
From the library to the café
From the café to the comrades
From the alley to the bedroom,
My bedroom
it smelled of flowers and
books
The windows
overlooking Talaat Harb
leaked the voice of Fairuz
Licked my tears
like a cat
tending to my depression.
The air of a prison cell
I sealed my ears
ignoring the fairy's summons
who came on higher orders
They say it's to protect me
What are you protecting me from, pray tell?
I am here on higher orders,
she stressed.
And what am I accused of?
Raising a rainbow.
This coloured veil will cover
those killed before you
those who would not see the sky
for a single day after their arrest.
You accuse me of existing then
My body swollen with lilac
is your evidence.
You are not to blame, fairy
You are made in our image
You share this cell with me
And a mouse
-what is its crime?-
accused of screeching
screech
we feel in our teeth like railways
and melt into pain
and dust.
I remembered then
writing on the walls
of a prison cell in Al Qanater
Love will triumph
Peace will prevail
next to Sabah Arbawi's words
Injustice is Haram
Zeinab rides her bike
and flies away
Estrangement
Canada was
packed with snow
My desk
scattered with papers
An eerie chatter
encircles me
invades my reality
decides to stay
in my mother's tongue.
I wrote
to expose the bastards
I wrote
and something awoke in us
Darling,
how much more love
till we reach your heart?
morning and evening
you sit there
dance with your lover
dissipate the cold
transgress boundaries
it becomes a mirror
We look into it
and out of it
to see without a doubt
You are me
And I am you
Even as I melt my hands
reach out to you
We dance
under the mind-light,
always-awake
like the moon
Imagine the sea
I felt the symbolism
of crossing from one world to another
It haunts me
Fairuz's voice
could not
numb my depression
if anything
it brought my demise
Longing is
-the smell of houses
washed up on beaches-
demise.
I could be the cat this time
and I just happen to be there
so they would write about me
if only I didn’t remember dying.
Here, the sea smells
of the stubbornness of flies
The houses smell
of the sea's resting place-
of what it holds
dogs, cats, people, sheep
all the same
we cannot stop breeding
eternally drawn to the sea
what lies behind it
like a third kiss
or a scream
under the sun.
Rainbow
That day
disappearance
was real
a spur of the moment
that stays on
for example
As I danced
waved a cloth
a rainbow
A current
lifted me as I rode it
on my friends' shoulders
a place where
I do not take bullets
Distance didn’t separate us
that day
immortalised by my smile
jumping
a happy image
serenading colours and skies
a moment of permanence
Oumayya's piano
Ziad's voice
Frida's paintings
the beats of friends
That day
I didn’t know that
I would die
three waves from now
Zeinab rides her bike and flies away