“Composing with Fragments” was a workshop held in spring 2025 by Carine Doumit, a film editor, writer, and researcher who explores montage as a writing tool, and as a methodology to building collective knowledge and experiences. Artists, filmmakers, writers and researchers who attended were encouraged to explore the potential of their fragments through collective and individual exercises and challenge the hierarchy between image, sound, voice, and text.

Within the current context, dispersed geographies and fractured times have become features of our reality in the region. Making sense of our fragmented realities grows increasingly challenging within the context of  ongoing violence, manifesting in a loss for words and meaning. The workshop borrowed from the conversation “When Writing Stutters” between Adania Shibli and Zeina G. Halabi which highlights that excavating fragments and seemingly ambivalent, minor details has an unmatched power to enunciate our current experiences. Participants explored writing and editing as intertwined gestures and tools within our reach, using them to find compositions within discontinuous and seemingly unrelated material.

Carine Doumit’s work explores montage as a methodology to build collective experience and knowledge. She writes and edits films, videos, installations, and performances shown in international festivals and art galleries. She writes short texts published online and exhibited in art spaces, and short stories published in contemporary art and design platforms. She shares her experience in montage as a writing tool through seminars, workshops and consultations. She has received fellowships from Arsenal Archives, Beirut Art Center, Bogliasco Center, and MacDowell.