Keeping the Fire Alive

Making it Here

There is a distinction at the heart of this episode that is easy to miss. The difference between making something here and making it from here.  Making something here is a logistical fact: the geography is incidental, the work could have come from anywhere. Making it from here is entirely something else.  It means the work carries the region inside it: the specific freedom of a city with no inherited idea of what you're supposed to be, the specific weight of building in a place that is simultaneously ancient and still becoming. This episode does not celebrate the outcomes, the awards, the exhibitions, the international recognition. It sits with the specific conditions that shaped the work. The cost of insisting on where you come from when the market rewards you more generously for smoothing it out. The permission that didn't exist until someone built anyway. The honest negotiation between the full version of who you are and the version that travels more easily. Five guests, five disciplines, one thread: the region is not a backdrop to the work. It is inside the work. El Seed  —  Paris-born Tunisian artist  Sumayya Dabbagh  —  Saudi architect   Badr Najeeb  —  Emirati pastry chef and chocolatier  Mariam Yehia  —  Egyptian-French fashion designer and founder of Mrs Keepa,   Amad Mian  —  Co-founder of Dastaangoi, a Dubai-based luxury fragrance house  Chapters 00:00 Intro 03:43 ElSeed on Arabic calligraphy as a bridge 05:47 Sumatra Dabbagh on her return 07:52 Badr Najeeb on the societal challenge 10:11 Mariam Yehia on being an Egyptian fashion designer 12:58 Amad Mian on the shift  13:58 Closing remarks  Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2430141/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.patreon.com/forward_moves] Download. Share. Subscribe.

The Long Game

The algorithm rewards the new, the rapid, the instantly shareable.  Brands need to go viral. Artists need to build audiences in months. Restaurants need to trend or they're written off. The entire vocabulary of ambition is built around the idea that if it's not happening fast, it's not happening at all. And yet, across three seasons of Forward_Moves, the people who built the things that genuinely matter described almost none of it quickly.  Almost all of them went through the same journey: doing the work without being sure it was actually working. The durability of what they built is directly related to the time they spent inside it. This episode is about that time. About what depth actually produces that speed cannot. About mastery as a daily decision, not a destination. And about the part of creative practice that never appears in any portfolio — the silent processing that happens not while you are working on the project, but in the hours around it. Voices in This Episode  Mohamed Maktabi  —  CEO of Iwan Maktabi,  Hani AlMalki  —  Dubai-based food writer and curator known as Bedouin Foodie.  Anthony Maalouf  —  Lebanese architect. Nada Debs  —  Designer and founder of Studio Nada Debs Omar Al-Gurk  —  Emirati designer, architect, and photographer, founder of Modu Method.  Zain Massoud  —  Landscape designer Chapters 00:00  Intro  02:30  Mohamed Maktabi on his Sufi mentor's lesson 05:09  Hani AlMalki on keeping it real 06:20  Hani on the shortcuts 07:51  Anthony Maalouf on the word ostentatious. 09:29  Nada Debs on intuition 10:52  Omar Al-Gurk on pottery as self-knowledge 12:25  Omar Al-Gurk on boredom as creative methodology 14:48  Zain Massoud 15:10  Closing comments "It's a career that you can continue indefinitely. You only get better." Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2430141/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.patreon.com/forward_moves] Download. Share. Subscribe.

Make it Heard

On creativity as resistance — and why making something from where you come from is never entirely innocent There is a word Raja was initially hesitant to use in this episode.  The word is resistance.  Not the confrontational kind — not the kind that announces itself. The quieter kind: the insistence on being seen, on telling your own story rather than having it told for you, the daily decision to make something from where you come from, knowing that in the current climate that act carries weight whether you intend it to or not. None of the guests in this episode frame their work as resistance. A supper club, a jewellery collection, a gallery, an online radio station, a sound art practice, a restaurant. None of them look the same. All of them function as exactly that — evidence of a culture that is richer and more complex than prevailing narratives tend to allow. The episode's central argument: when you argue with the wrong story, you feed it. When you replace it — when you produce something so true and so full of life that the wrong story becomes less credible without you ever engaging it — that is how the narrative actually shifts. Voices in this episode Radio Alhara  —  Palestinian online radio station founded during COVID Ahmad Halawa  —  Palestinian chef and founder of Ysupper clubs in Dubai. Nadine Kanso  —  Lebanese jewellery designer and founder of Bil Arabi. Amrita Sethi  —  Sound artist and founder of Soundbite. Sunny Rahbar  —  Co-founder of The Third Line gallery in Dubai. Basil Yassin  —  Founder of Yava restaurant in Dubai. Omar Al-Gurk  —  Emirati designer and founder of Modu Method. Chapters   00:53  Intro  03:08  Radio Alhara  05:20  Ahmad Halawa on his supper clubs 06:46  Nadine Kanso on September 11th as the trigger 07:29  Raja on the broader principle 09:24  Amrita Sethi on pioneering a form that had no precedent 11:39  Sunny Rahbar on coming back 12:39  Basil Yassin  14:13  Omar Al-Gurk on the 1960s and 70s 14:43  Closing argument Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2430141/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.patreon.com/forward_moves] Download. Share. Subscribe.

Home is Not a Place

Every single person featured across three seasons of Forward_Moves lives between two places. Some between two countries. Some between a homeland they can access and one they cannot. Some between the person they were expected to be and the person they turned out to be. What Raja expected to find in the archive was pain around that in-between state: a longing for resolution, for belonging to one place or another.  What he found instead was almost exactly the opposite. The between is not where the problem lives. It's where the work comes from. This episode explores what happens when you stop fighting the in-between and start creating from it — and what that has produced for five very different people, across five very different disciplines. Voices in This Episode Bady Dalloul  —  French-Syrian multimedia artist. Has been unable to visit Syria since 2009. His matchbox drawings — hundreds of tiny scenes, entire narratives compressed into the size of your palm — carry the weight of a homeland transformed into imagination.  Salma Mousfi  —  Lebanese singer and creator of Salma Nova. Lives between Paris and Beirut, belonging fully to both. Her album Salma Nova was written from the frustration of wanting to return to Lebanon during the 2006 war — and being unable to.  Sumayya Dabbagh  —  Saudi architect. Moved from Saudi Arabia to England at 13 — a jolt that became the most important question of her life. Her buildings, including the Gargash Mosque in Dubai, give others the sense of belonging she had to work hard to find for herself.  Ahmad Halawa  —  Palestinian chef and founder of supper clubs in Dubai. Has never been to Palestine, yet carries it in every dish. He makes maqlubeh from memory — reconstructed by feel in a Cairo kitchen when he was a student abroad.  Yousef Anastas  —  Co-founder of Radio Alhara, the Palestinian online radio station founded during COVID lockdown. Named Alhara — the neighborhood — because the neighborhood is not a location. It is a feeling of gathering.  Ricardo Karam  —  Lebanese broadcaster and founder of TAKREEM. Runs every morning on the Beirut Corniche, greeting the same faces, buying kaak from the same vendor. Chooses to remain in a city that gives him every reason to leave.  Key Moments  00:00:35  Raja introduces the episode's central discovery: that the in-between is not the problem — it's the studio. 00:02:52  Bady Dalloul on what happens when you can't go home: grief, and then imagination. The phase that comes after loss. 00:04:47  Salma Mousfi on landing in both Paris and Beirut and feeling, both times, that she is home. 'I'm lucky.' 00:06:52  Sumayya Dabbagh on the jolt of moving to England at 13: 'It really jolted me into thinking — who am I?' 00:08:26  Ahmad Halawa on carrying a homeland he has never seen: 'Palestine was engraved in us since we were kids.' 00:10:10  Yousef Anastas on Radio Alhara: the whole world as part of the same neighborhood. 00:12:03  Ricardo Karam on why he stays in Beirut: the same faces every morning, the same kaak vendor, the same beautiful smiles. 00:13:39  Raja's closing thought: 'Home is not a place. Home is the clarity about who you are that makes every place a little bit possible.' Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2430141/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.patreon.com/forward_moves] Download. Share. Subscribe.

Keeping the Fire Alive

What does it actually mean to honour a tradition? In this recap episode, Raja Haddad revisits 6 conversations from the archive to explore a single, essential distinction: the difference between preserving the ashes and keeping the fire alive.  The title comes from Mohamed Maktabi, heir to a Persian carpet legacy stretching back to his grandfather in Beirut, who described Iwan Maktabi as a forward-thinking brand that keeps the fire alive. Not the ashes but the fire. It's a distinction that turns out to run through the work of every guest in this episode.  Guests revisited: Mohamed Maktabi: 3 generations deep in one of the Arab world's most storied carpet traditions, Mo's philosophy isn't preservation for its own sake. It's understanding what the tradition was actually doing and finding ways to keep doing that in the present.  Nada Debs: The Lebanese-Japanese designer went to a Damascus workshop and asked a craftsman who spent 3 months inlaying mother of pearl to strip everything back to the underlying geometry. By removing centuries of decorative convention, she made the logic of the craft visible for the first time and produced work that is simultaneously ancient and completely contemporary.  Anthony Maalouf: The Lebanese architect shared the origin story of the Dabke: Lebanon's celebrated folk dance started as roof maintenance. Neighbours gathering before winter to seal each other's homes, the stomp and rhythm emerging from the work itself. Anthony carries that same logic into his practice. When restoring Salon Beyrouth, he used the same marbles, brass, and woods Lebanese craftsmen used in the 1950s and 60s.  Basil Yassin: The Palestinian culinary creator behind Yava in Dubai doesn't replicate his mother's recipes. He traces the principles behind them - the olive oil, the sumac, the generosity of the Palestinian table - and builds new forms around those principles. Amad Mian: The perfumer's anchor is jasmine as a specific memory - his grandmother, a house, a smell that meant safety and home. That specificity is what makes the scent resonate across Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, the UAE.  Hani AlMalki: The Saudi food writer and Bedouin Foodie invokes the Japanese concept of shokunin - the master craftsman devoted to a lifetime of one thing - and asks why we don't celebrate our own version of it.   Don't reach for the generic version of your heritage. Go to the specific as that's where the life is.  Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:01 Mo Maktabi: Keeping the Fire Alive 00:03 Nada Debs: The Visible Craft 00:04 Anthony Maalouf: The Origins of Dabke 00:07 Basil Yasin: New Forms around Original Principals 00:09 Amad Mian: Scent Memory 00:11 Hani Al Malki: The Sukonins among us Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2430141/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.patreon.com/forward_moves] Download. Share. Subscribe.