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Nathalie Harb
Nathalie Harb is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based between Paris and Beirut, focused on rethinking public space from the perspective of everyday urban practitioners in conflict-affected cities. Her work is centered around well-being and spatial justice. It challenges challenges notions of home, shelter, and agency through different practice formats, including public interventions, installations, and scenography, sited accross urban and rural contexts in Europe, Latin America and the middles East. By adopting a collaborative, horizontal approach, Harb’s projects emphasize themes of safe space and equity, with authorship shared among a diverse range of design collaborators, including musicians, acoustic consultants, permaculture experts, environmental consultants, researchers and architects.
Nathalie's installations, explore the potential for intimacy and rest within the bustling urban landscape, introducing moments of stillness in an otherwise saturated environment. Her projects aim to create spaces that foster connection and reflection, and to offer alternative visions of public space that prioritizes inclusivity and a sense of belonging. Nathalie's work has been shown internationally and supported by initiatives such as Unesco’s Week of Sound, the American University of Beirut’s Neighborhood Initiative, the London Design Biennale, the European Research Council, Dubai Design Week, Beirut Design Week, the London Festival of Architecture, Soncities and the Temporary Art Platform. She has also been the recipient of several residencies, including ZKU Berlin, Residenciia Sao Jao in Brasil and La Cité Internationale des Arts-Paris.
Over the course of 23 days of residency in Rijeka, I will reflect on the fragmented nature of time by revisiting the past year through 15-day segments. Each day, I will explore the images, sounds, information, and news that shaped it. Through photographs, sound recordings, and journal entries, I will create a video or collage that distills the essence of each segment, building a personal archive of a year marked by multiple, often conflicting temporalities. The year felt both distant and immediate shaped by the genocide in Palestine, the war in Lebanon, Trump’s leadership reversing decades of progress, and my own experience of medical illness. Living outside Lebanon, in a western city largely unaffected by the physical violence of war, I found myself caught between personal and global temporalities—my body processing both the violence unfolding in the region and the slow, suspended cycles of illness and treatment. The cognitive dissonance of these overlapping temporalities—coping with loss, rising violence, and the overwhelming flow of information—shaped both my experience of the world and the art-making process. This month in Rijeka offers a space to slow down and catch up with the time that has passed—like the feeling of moving through the world at a pace that outstrips the rhythm of the soul. It is a moment to align the body and mind, to become present to the day as it is.
Rijeka, located where the Rječina River meets the Adriatic Sea, offers a fitting backdrop for this reflection. It echoes the multi-dimensional diary I created in my first collaboration with Art Explora on founder of Temporary Art Platform's Amanda Abi Khalil‘s invitation, where I explored the dialogue between land, sea, and river as symbols of personal and collective journeys. The rhythms of Rijeka resonate with this ongoing process of reflection, as I confront the shifting layers of personal, collective, and political crises, and explore how trauma, survival, and creation take shape in response to the fragmented nature of time.
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