Sama BEYDOUN
Interdisciplinary Artist

Sama received a grant as part of the “Emerging Artists from Here and Elsewhere” program initiated with the association Thanks for Nothing

What is your artistic journey?
I've been mark-making for as long as I remember. Growing up in Beirut taught me that things disappear, fast and without asking: a building, a shopfront, the current version of ordinary life. So, I became a collector almost defensively, before I understood it as a method. I express myself through photography, graphic design, journaling, drawing, ceramic making, or the weaving of changing landscapes.
Holding onto things as they were isn't nostalgia to me, it's closer to refusal: this happened, this existed; you don't get to erase it quietly. But keeping isn't the same as hoarding. What I collect, I want to eventually open the door on. That's closer to how I was raised, where nothing worth having ever stayed in one pair of hands. Mother Tongue moves exactly that way: hold something close first, long enough to understand it, then set a table and let other people, stories, points of view in.

How do you see your profession today?
I move between mediums the same way I move between languages. When one doesn't suffice, I reach for the one that tells the story better. I think of it less as a discipline than a toolbox: multi-modal, the way our times have become. I'm currently interested in the invitation as an art form: the conditions of transmission, of gathering, of mark-making.

How do you see yourself in 5 years? In 10 years?
In five years, I see myself still in motion: traveling residencies and exhibitions each one as a way of testing the work against a place that's new to it. That restlessness feeds Mother Tongue, a project about building a home elsewhere through culinary heritage and transmission.
In ten years, I'd like to have earned the opposite: a studio in each country, Lebanon and France both, not as a compromise between them but as two fixed points the work can keep swinging between: one for fieldwork, the other a laboratory where the transformation happens. That's the role Motherland, my current project, plays right now: anchoring, re-rooting in the ancestral knowledge that's bound us together through time and hardship.

Interview conducted in 2026
Photographs taken in 2026 by Yama Ndiaye