Leaving oneËs own Middle East collective state of mind and linking with others stimulates emotional and instinctual waves of experience. Dense socio-cultural layers and lines devise the region. They force singular acts, and compel communal readings. These distinct Middle East "I/We" writing and erasure tensions forge physical encounters. These realities construct undefined regional depths of meaning.

Contradicting powers outline the regionËs social realities. Violence and culture blend all across the region. The fusion of burning and boiling political tensions, current ethnic and religious collisions in the sites of ancient civilizations establish a unique human setting. The situation is all the more complicated as the Middle East is culturally and geographically in and part of Asia, Africa and Europe.

The tensions between the private life and social space; the modern (by organization) forces of the state, and the traditional, communal and religious alliances and the singularity of the self are blatantly strong. The social infests everything, every moment and every part of oneËs body. The singular is liable to the plural, but it also carries the plural within it like an internal organ.

Latitudes open to artists in other parts of the world are not experienced in many parts of the region. Cultural remoteness, seeming immutability of the religious perspective, the effective negation of the individual and control systems, reduce the role of art to a status of placebo. These realities hold artists back in familiar patterns of alienation and orthodoxy; against a background of the steady decay of traditional cultures, spoliation of unique environments, and the spread of degenerating urbanism.

Delicate social grounds set a peculiar position for critical artistic presence. The public space is shared between true/false volatile, religious, secular, national, ethnic, patrimonial, economic, global market and communication systems and powers. Any singular artistic activity signifies a rift with common social forms of negotiation and suggests other writing probabilities.

In this fragile region, the move towards genuine critical art processes are politicized and thwarted, and at times regarded to be coming from the outside of the "We." The ability to unfold the regionËs perceptions and preconceptions depend upon the improbable interlocal and communal points of view.

It is a manner of unattainable singularity that sustains an intercommunal outlook, reads obscure situations, creates a difference and has global legibility. This singularity is an inward regional Diaspora, a nonexilic seclusion and alternative, a rhizomatic cultural reading. This Diaspora dis/appearance state of mind has a personal form of experience and a subtle critical expression.

In wandering across lines, one abandons oneËs soul and invades a different one. Devouring oneself and the other. Proximity is defined by an experience of possible impossibilities, by being within walls. The regional voyage trails in alleys of withdrawal. The journey along the narrow shadowed walls is a long walk in confined distances.

The sense of a distance is achieved by crossing territories, by stepping out of the shadow, and by getting into the glaring reality of self/other randomness.

The Middle East Roteiros writes a route within distances: Walking away from oneËs situation, the engagement with the other, and the blatant experience of reality. The slash of "dis/ appearance" implies a motion between impossible distances: the movement between an imagined and forceful regional singularity and the actualness of a splintered mutuality.