Investigations

Thought doesn't exist in a vacuum. It collides with institutions that hierarchize materials, markets that convert canything into content, structures of displacement that grant some bodies mobility while others remain trapped. These entries track those collisions without promising resolution.

They ask: What does it mean to practice care work as methodology when care alone cannot solve systemic collapse? How does an artist working in clay refuse colonial hierarchies (that dismiss ceramics as craft) and market pressures (that demand novelty without political commitment)? What accumulates across a life of migration, objects, memories, complicity, and what must be released?

This is structural analysis embedded in autobiography, phenomenology grounded in political economy, diagnostic work that refuses the entitlement and comfort of manifestos.

The method: sit inside contradictions long enough to see what becomes clear.

The commitment: transparency about positionality, accountability for extraction, refusal of false resolution. No clean exits.

A Safety Guide for Artists

Essential Resources for Culture Bearers and Truth-Tellers. This comprehensive manual, published by PEN America in January 2021, serves as an essential complement to the work I've been documenting, offering practical frameworks for artists, writers, and cultural practitioners who find themselves targeted for their creative expression. The ARC Safety Guide emerges from a stark reality: in 2019 alone, over 700 incidents of artistic freedom violations were documented across at le

ibrahim khazzaka

5 days ago2 min read

Have we Lost the World for Its Parts? (Part 2)

A Framework for Understanding Fragmentation, Lost Futures, and Locked Imaginations Part III: When Art Forgets to Build A feeling has followed me through every art gallery, and it's taken me years to understand that what I was encountering wasn't failure but strategy, wasn't accident but deliberate choice, wasn't one artist's limitation but an entire mode of cultural production that had decided, for reasons that made historical sense even if they led to a dead end, that meani

ibrahim khazzaka

Jan 1519 min read

Have We Lost the World for Its Parts? (Part 1)

A Framework for Understanding Fragmentation, Lost Futures, and Locked Imaginations Part I: The Iconoclasm and Its Weapon It's 11:47 PM and i am doing it again, my phone glowing blue in the dark like a lifeline to everywhere and nowhere at once, and the first thing i see is a video of Gaza, rubble, a child's kissing the hand of a diceased grown up,cand I swipe, now it's an academic thread about decolonial theory that i started reading three days ago and will never finish on my

ibrahim khazzaka

Jan 1321 min read

In The Shadow Of Collapse

Cultural Production, Temporal Displacement, and the Ethics of Documentation in Post-Crisis Societies Nostalgia, extraction, and care work in Lebanon

ibrahim khazzaka

Jan 816 min read

We are people of accumulation, and therefore, ironically, of waste.

I invite you to trace with me a geography of displacement, where every border crossed became a threshold between holding and releasing. This is more than a story of movement; it is an investigation of the self, excavated through the objects I chose to carry and those I dared to abandon. It is a chronicle of the eternal negotiation between the responsibility of memory and the liberation of letting go. A Cartography of Becoming Since leaving Lebanon in 2012, my life has unfolde

ibrahim khazzaka

Sep 22, 20258 min read

On Gold Luster and Pink Floyd: Insights for 2026

"The American dream is the dream that our children will have it better than we did." - Terry Real

ibrahim khazzaka

May 22, 20253 min read

Lovers and Servants at the Gate of Dawn

Introduction: The Gate as Threshold and Trial To be a Lebanese ceramic artist in an American MFA program is to stand perpetually at a threshold—what I named “The Gate of Dawn.” This was more than a metaphor; it was my lived condition: a site of arrival and uncertainty, hope and exhaustion, longing and duty. At this gate, I encountered my archetypes' duality. The Lovers yearned for communion, creative intimacy, and sacred recognition. The Servants shouldered heavy expectati

ibrahim khazzaka

May 7, 20258 min read

Aesthetic Stasis, and My Pathways to a Living Culture

The Lebanese cultural landscape is a paradox of vibrant energy and profound stasis. It is a place where dazzling creativity coexists with a pervasive sense of being trapped, of an artistic conversation perpetually circling back to the same themes, forms, and unresolved tensions. As a Lebanese artist working from the United States, I live this paradox daily. To understand this condition—to explain why our aesthetics often feel "stuck in time"—I have had to embark on a multi-la

ibrahim khazzaka

May 5, 20257 min read

Intimacy, Race, and Decolonization

As an immigrant gay man, it was a process to find my own path in this city… to explore my sexuality and to embrace who I was in a place that sometimes doesn’t have boundaries or allow you to… be whoever you want to be.”

ibrahim khazzaka

Apr 25, 20255 min read

Who Gets to Be Neurodivergent in America?

Rethinking Identity, Care, and Accountability In recent years, conversations about neurodivergence have entered mainstream culture. Social media is filled with personal stories, infographics, and self-assessment tools for ADHD, autism, and sensory processing differences. In today’s climate of identity politics, identifying as neurodivergent has become a kind of shorthand-not just for difference, but also for trauma, disconnection, and a desire to belong. Yet, there’s an impor

ibrahim khazzaka

Apr 24, 20256 min read