Dr. Pamela Chrabieh

It was an honour to participate this afternoon in the London Arts-Based Research Centre Transnational Conference “Women Who Create: The Feminine and the Arts”, held at the University of Cambridge and online, with my talk “Integrated Iconography and Hybridity in Times of War.” I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to contribute to such an important space dedicated to women’s creativity across the arts, scholarship, and professional practice – a space that reminds us how urgently we still need encounters where art, thought, lived experience, and critical dialogue can meet.

My warm thanks as well to everyone who joined our session this Sunday afternoon for such a rich, generous, and insightful conversation and Q&A. And a very special thank you to my dear friend Dr. Roula-Maria Dib for her tremendous work at LABRC and for helping sustain this kind of necessary intellectual and creative gathering.

In my talk, I reflected on what I call “Integrated Iconography” as my artistic practice and on the deeper logic beneath it, which I call hybridity: not as a style or fashionable mixture, but as a condition of existence in a world that is already layered, entangled, translated, and yet increasingly fractured by war, extremism, and polarization.

Drawing from my experience as an artist and from the ongoing catastrophe in Lebanon and the Levant, I spoke about what war does not only to places and bodies, but also to artistic practice, to women artists working from the margins, and to the fragile cultural ecosystems trying to survive under bombardment and systemic erasure. At Kulturnest, we witness daily how artists are forced to pause, relocate, or create under extreme conditions, and how sustaining even the smallest spaces of dialogue and creation becomes both difficult and essential.

My argument was not that hybridity is a solution, but that, despite its limits and ambiguities, it can become one of the fragile ways of resisting fragmentation, sustaining relation, and continuing to create – and to remain human – when violence is trying to reduce us to fixed categories, separations, and ruins.