Untitled. Photo by Osama Esid.

Confluent

Come sit at the banks of a strange confluence of the here-and-now, and the there-and-now. “Confluence” means the meeting of two rivers, and for tonight, one of the Arab world’s major waterways meets one of North America’s under the Hennepin Avenue bridge, in a poetic and visual dialogue. Mizna’s rivers project also plays on the idea of “fluency” in communication and communing. When it comes to Arab and American worlds and the people who straddle both, the concepts of confluence and fluency are very alive, literally and metaphorically. This project on a fundamental level also speaks to overlapping natural and human geography realities locally and halfway across the globe, joining together two major economic, historical, and ecological systems that run as similar veins in different cultures. As one river physically flows all night here, the projected other flows all day there, far but confluent.