Cocoon for All, Wings of None

Perceptions of Middle Eastern, or Mashreqi, culture in recent years have dissolved into a jumble of shawarma and falafel corner shops, dabke dances at festivities, and Palestine solidarity protests. That’s not to say that these things aren’t vibrant elements of the fabric that draws the region together, but these perceptions risk reducing the entire region and its minorities to a handful of digestible stereotypes. However well-meaning, these generalizations often erase efforts made by regional creatives emerging from these minorities. This highlights the need for creative spaces free from misinformed expectations, where artists can be uninhibited in their self-expression. Property of No One aims to do exactly that: in a single-day program curated by Mashreqi multi-disciplinarians, the festival bridges a gap between the familiar facets of Arab culture and the authentic, often unexposed, corners of the region’s talents. In doing so, it endorses a vision for meaningful representation, visibility, and connection.

Property of No One emerges in a world characterized by inevitable mass interconnectedness. A context where Instagram feeds are inherently mediums to buy and sell users, shifting between documenting the harrowing details of an ongoing genocide and lifestyle influencer content. The exposure of the digital age has dissolved our sense of community, and naturally so, has seemingly numbed our sense of empathy and humanity for one another. In that comes the paradoxical recognition that, likely, it is the same tools of the digital age that help expand the reach of initiatives that aim to form communities based on rebuilding human connection. As such, Property of No One represents the notion that creativity and expression should not be owned or sold by an individual or institution and, therefore, should be treated as sacred pillars of the human experience, larger than humanity itself. In that sanctity comes a commitment to providing a collective space that values artistic liberty, inclusivity, and togetherness.

Essential to this notion is the process of situating Mashreqi art within its given socio-political context, both in the Western settings in which it is platformed and in the Mashreq itself. Artists participating in Property of No One emerge from political contexts notorious for authoritarianism, such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In their struggle against policing and repression, they bring to bloom an art form fundamentally and beautifully resistant. Whether it’s Luka Salam’s gentle voice with a commentary on social pressures on women or Zaid Khaled’s romantic autotunes, it’s resistant against oppressive and unjust power structures, but more so, against conventions that aim to label, contain, and box them in.

While many of those conventions come from cultural limitations in their home countries, they are, without a doubt, projected onto how they are perceived abroad. Arab diasporas, being one of the largest minority groups scattered across Europe, are consistently misrepresented, underrepresented, or unrepresented altogether. The general marketization of the arts has made it so that Mashreqi art is often underappreciated if it falls outside familiar orientalist tropes, and Mashreqi presence is only welcomed if it’s deemed unthreatening to the Western context it exists within. The festival challenges these tropes with a vibrant and diverse lineup featuring Bu Kolthoum, Juno, Maya Ma, Hadi Birajakli, Luka Salam, and Zaid Khaled.

In this light, the festival charts points of openness and change, endorses spaces that leave room for cultural exchange and dialogue, and takes part in forming communities that challenge structural imbalances. To do so, the festival’s second room provides a platform for not only the familiar faces of Mashreqi art but also its unheard voices, sounds, and messages. Co-hosted by Kalam Aflam and Sayyad Station, two Europe-based Mashreqi platforms, the room will showcase regional movies and sounds. In the same essence, there will also be small cultural workshops aimed at engaging with the stories of the region and a curated market by MESS, where a special selection of Mashreqi goods can be found. Through its design, the festival works towards dismantling a reductionist view of the region and realizes a vision for creating a shared space as a direct means of strengthening our collective resistance and unity.

For its loud streets and scorching heat, the chaos of Cairo has given birth to some of the coolest voices of our generation. Something about the city, perhaps its density or endless noise, breeds characters with assertion and angst. Cairo’s legacy of connection with art and culture has long established it as a nexus for performances from across the Mashreq. As part of our journey towards a deeper understanding of the region’s art, we sat down with Juno and Maya Ma from the Property of No One lineup. The interviews explore the exchange between inner creative realms and the material world, as well as the challenges of navigating cultural identity. Representing ruptures in the familiar sounds of the Mashreq, Juno and Maya Ma anchor their identities in authenticity and truth.

Jannah Emam, known as Juno, brings her ethereal voice to gentle melodies with lyrics that reflect the complexities of becoming and the contradictions of unbecoming. Her words mirror experiences rooted in the challenges of change, the passage of time, and the ongoing process of self-discovery. While she speaks of the sometimes harsh realities of being human, Juno constructs a universe of otherworldly sounds that invite connection through wandering and fantasy. Maya Ma is the alias of Ramy Abul-Ata—or, in his own words, “a vessel for communicating [his] experiences in ways beyond this world.” His debut album, 'Meeting Maya', released earlier this year, explores connection, passion, and purpose on a profound level. The album offers a glimpse into hesitation, loneliness, and doubt that so often seeps into life, but even more so, into the beauty and magic of creating and being.

The alternate realities that Juno and Maya Ma bring into existence represent the process of finding oneself amidst noise, chaos, and expectations. Both Jannah and Ramy describe their creative journeys and art as fundamentally tied to notions of authenticity and belonging. For Ramy, music is his way of alleviating material pressures, dissolving traces of individuality and egoism, and constructing an arena for “our spirits to dance freely.” He believes in the potential of using music as a route to universality among humans, as a means of understanding one another in the face of rising separations and extremities. Since both of them have left their Cairo cocoons (Juno to Berlin and Ramy to Rotterdam), they share a common thread of challenges to resonance and belonging. Juno’s latest single, 'Supersonic', was written after her move to Berlin, witnessing the horrific violence in Palestine and the incremental siege and starvation in Gaza. She experiments with new sounds, with a voice that balances rage and hopelessness toward the misery unfolding.

This turbulence between rage and hopelessness is among the most relatable dualities for Arabs abroad today. As we continue trying to boycott while simultaneously paying tuition to academic institutions that fund the genocide, or working in offices that collaborate with Zionist corporations, a sense of helplessness and dissonance becomes central to daily life. And as we navigate communities and towns full of immigrants, we encounter vicious and all too common social interactions. Ramy described times when he felt like “sides of [him] that are Egyptian have no room here.” For him, the infliction of casual jabs at his Arabic accent represents a deeper burden to belonging that many immigrants face: the dismissal, distortion, or appropriation of our voices and sounds.

Still, Jannah and Ramy’s identities aren’t fully settled in Egypt either. In a landscape tainted by state policing and surveillance, as well as societal constraints on self-expression, being different or unconventional is rejected entirely. “Just being me is an act of resistance or rebellion within itself,” said Jannah, as she described navigating Egypt’s conservative society. In the face of negotiating belonging and cultural identity in both Mashreqi and European creative scenes, Juno and Maya Ma’s music emerges as a direct act of resistance; in all its varied sounds and vibrant colors. The very act of launching Juno and Maya Ma in a field of alternative and indie-pop dominated by white artists brings the collective closer to ideals of meaningful representation. Embodying the ethos of the festival, their art sends a message: stages should not be monopolized, self-expression should be boundless, and music should be Property of No One.

In our final chapter of the exploration of Mashreqi art and culture, we confront the unfortunate core of many Arab experiences: roots that have been ripped out and forced to grow worlds away from where they were planted and nurtured. Inseparable from the region’s experiences and art, displacement reveals itself as an unbroken chain passed down from one generation to the next. Coming from two of the world’s largest displaced populations, musicians Hadi Birajakli and Zaid Khaled from the ‘Property of No One’ lineup spoke with us about home, community, and music. 

Hadi Birajakli, originally from Aleppo, moved to Cairo with his family after the protests of the Arab Spring rolled into a full-scale civil war. His discography is almost entirely built around narrating the experience of leaving home. In his single, ‘El Beit’, he mourns his lost home, grieving the crushed flowers of neglected possibilities abandoned in Syria. His latest music video for his single ‘Safer’ follows him walking through the dizzying streets of Cairo, holding a mirror that reflects absurd encounters in a city he’s known for a decade but that somehow remains unfamiliar to him. The Syrian musician expressed a deep connection to his homeland, reflecting on his visit to perform after the Assad regime collapsed in 2024. “It was a crazy feeling to be surrounded by people who are like me. And the people in Syria are hungry for any type of joy. [They] were beautiful. To know that you’re making a difference for your own people in your own place, it’s different.”

While Hadi carries an unsettled sense of belonging after moving to Egypt, Zaid considers it his only home. Born in Amman and raised in Saudi Arabia, Zaid Khaled moved to Cairo on his own after university. He left behind a successful career in cinematography and, since then, has grown to be one of pop’s freshest voices, melting old and new Mashreqi production and lyrically pouring his heart out. Like many Jordanians, Zaid is a Palestinian whose parents were displaced in the 1948 Nakba. He describes a complex relationship with Amman, explaining that he was never taken seriously within the tight-knit creative scene. Even in finding recognition and community in Egypt, Zaid admits that he has never felt stable or rooted. Instead, he finds strength in the formation of his music and identity around motion, travel, and fluidity. But as he recalls past professional opportunities that he was forced to pass on due to visa complications, the irony reveals itself.

As our borders are drawn, redrawn, recognized, and unrecognized, European borders remain untouched, secured, and inaccessible. As Mashreqis escape conflicts funded by Western interests, the far-right demands a crackdown on immigrants. We internalize measures of privilege that tell us that we’re lucky if we’ve managed to seek out better lives; after all, tens of thousands never made it out alive, or at least carry the scars of missing limbs and lost loved ones. Hadi referred to his survivor’s guilt: “Although I experienced a lot of horrible stuff before I left Syria, I felt too privileged to talk about these issues because I didn’t have it as bad as others.” Hadi went on to say: “I then realized that since I do have the resources and time, I should put in the effort and bring awareness to these matters.”

And while these Arab narrations are indispensable and beautiful, they don’t represent a definitive image of what Mashreqi art should look like. Zaid asserted this view from the get-go: “I’m not here to represent Jordan or anyone else, I’m here to represent Zaid.” In his words lies a wider truth: that resistance takes a myriad of formats, in our pain or laughter, in our togetherness or individuality, in our artistry or our mere existence. Resistance and emancipation live in these dichotomies — all valid, powerful, and resilient in their own right.