A Dragon in the Halls of Diplomacy

Dragon in the Halls of Diplomacy is a lecture performance exploring the power and limits of civilized language. At its center is a dragon that resides in the UN headquarters in New York—a silent witness to diplomacy, reminding the world of its evils. But the dragon also represents something more insidious: the first step in dehumanization, where entire peoples are reduced to monstrous images. When this happens, their voices are no longer heard as part of civilized discourse. Their struggles are dismissed as crude disruptions, their demands for justice reduced to unintelligible noise. 

The lecture, led by Lebanese artist Nadim Choufi, engages with Arab poets who refused to conform to languages that normalized their suffering. Instead, these poets turned to metaphors of animals, beasts, and natural forces—reshaping themselves and their loved ones to reclaim expression, love, and resistance. Through their words, the lecture seeks to converse with the dragon, asking: If civilized language is slowly erasing me, what tongues will allow me to speak? What form must I take to articulate my existence? 

Choufi’s lecture will be accompanied by artistic responses from Donia Massoud (EGY) and Fatena Al-Ghorra (BEL-PSE), who engage with these ideas through song and poetry, respectively. Their performances extend the conversation, embodying alternative ways of speaking, singing, and resisting.

Nadim Choufi 

Nadim Choufi is a Lebanese artist who works with sculpture, text, and moving image. He currently lives and works in Rotterdam. 

His work explores ideals of progress, how they manifest and seduce, and affect those who live with their consequences. He draws on desires that challenge dominant national and global narratives of progress.

Donia Massoud 

Donia Massoud is a singer, actress and music researcher, renowned for her contributions to music performance, ethnology, documentation and rearrangement of almost disappearing music heritage from Egypt and the Arabic speaking region.  

Between 2000 and 2010, Donia Massoud has travelled to several Arab villages collecting a nearly lost heritage of sacred and profane songs and music material. Discovering theatrical and choreographic material related to that music heritage, Donia’s renditions of this collection took a theatre and performance based turn, staging these works into unique works that straddle the format of concert, plays and performance art. 

Her work has toured extensively in the Arabic Speaking World and Europe for almost two decades, and was presented on reputable world stages including Kammerspiele (Munich), Cairo Opera House (Cairo), Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), Bastionen (Malmo), Jerash Amphitheater (Jerash), Museo Egizio (Torino), Zanzibar Castle (Zanzibar), Odeon Theater (Amman) among many others. To shed more light on the theatrical aspects of the songs, Donia decided recently to transform the project into an a cappella format, aiming to draw greater attention to the compelling stories embedded in these songs.

Fatena Al-Ghorra

Fatena Al-Ghorra is a Palestinian poet and journalist. Born and educated in Gaza, she worked as a radio presenter and correspondent for the Wafa news agency and participated in various women's projects. In 2009, she sought asylum in Belgium, where she has lived since and later obtained the Belgian nationality. 

With five published poetry collections—some of which have been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Dutch—she is considered one of the most prominent Palestinian poets of her generation. Her work explores themes of displacement, identity, and resistance. In addition to her own poetry, she translates Dutch poetry into Arabic and organizes Fatena’s Poetry Salon in the Netherlands and Belgium.