Alia Alzougbi and Dima Mekdad reflect on Shubbak Festival 2025
Exactly one month ago, we said goodbye to a delegation of global festival makers and cultural workers devoted to nurturing Arab and SWANA creative production. Just the day before, we had held our final event of Shubbak Festival 2025.
After almost two years pregnant with grief and rage, we have questioned our purpose as festival makers while witnessing a genocide in Gaza, a brutal war across Palestine, unspeakable atrocities in Sudan, and the unraveling of so many of our countries into strife and instability, too often shaped by the continuation of historic proxy interventions from without.
Our own Arab and SWANA bodies, with umbilical cords tied to the soil, as well as bloodlines and storylines intertwined with loved ones back home, have felt every tremor despite the distance. And so, over the three weeks of the festival, we moved skin against skin across London with others, artists, audiences & colleagues, who are also searching for light through an unimaginable nightmare, gathering in pockets of shared intention, allowing ourselves moments of joy, trusting into spaces of unleashed release, before dispersing with the knowledge that we will find each other again at the next event.
This work has been in the making since March 2024. Together, we have conspired to dream and to deliver a festival, bridging with those we’ve journeyed alongside for years, welcoming those who joined us for the first time in this iteration, and embracing everything in between.
Our gratitude is vast, so wide and circular that if we could write it in rings, we would. No single person or entity comes first or last. It is through the collective body we formed that the world of Shubbak Festival 2025 took its breath into being.
To the artists and cultural workers, those engineers of the imaginations without whom none of this would be possible.
To the Shubbak team, staff and trustees who each carried the weight of this labour with immense grace, generosity, and openness.
To the volunteers, who went above and beyond, fueling our events with their loving presence and readiness.
To our partners, the venues, co‑conspirators, co‑commissioners, co‑producers, and funders, who moved with us to present what so many have called our ‘boldest’ programme to date.
And to our audience, who showed up in a force never felt before at Shubbak, assuring us through their presence that maybe, just maybe, we are offering something that is needed in these times.
To know that this is our ecosystem is to know that the ground we move upon is solid, and that the steps we take are surer because of it.