What if the identity question isn't something to resolve before you start creating, but the creative material itself?

In this first episode of the Forward Moves recap series, Raja revisits 38 episodes across 3 seasons and surfaces the thread that runs through nearly every conversation: identity. The guests who've done the most original, durable work aren't the ones who figured themselves out early. They're the ones who learned to live inside the uncertainty and made it productive.

Voices from the archive:

Bady Dalloul (French-Syrian multimedia artist) says answering the identity question will take a lifetime and means it without frustration. That open-endedness is what keeps driving him back to the studio, and into the fictional nations, invented archives, and miniature worlds that define his practice.

Nada Debs (designer) spent years treating her Japanese upbringing and Arab heritage as 2 separate things she had to keep apart. The breakthrough was realising she didn't have to. East and East, she calls it.

Amad Mian (founder, Dastaangoi) started from a place of shame about his Pakistani identity and built an entire fragrance and storytelling house in order to change that. He didn't wait to feel proud. He created in order to get there.

Nadine Kanso (founder, Bil Arabi) was galvanised by September 11th, watching people around her become afraid of their own Arabic names. Her response was to make the Arabic language the most visible, celebrated thing she could. The brand name itself is the statement.

Ricardo Karam (media personality, founder of the Takreem Foundation) has spent 3 decades arguing, through thousands of hours of conversation, that the Arab world is richer and more extraordinary than the prevailing narrative allows. What we need, he says, isn't a new identity but a return to what we already have.

Nez Gebreel (co-founder, Dubai Design Week) stopped seeing her layered British, Arab, Italian, Greek and Turkish influences as a conflict to manage and started treating them as a creative advantage. Why can't I be all of them? she asks, and means it as a creative position, not just a personal one.

Meshary Al Nassar (Kuwaiti interior designer) offers the most freeing take of all: no one knows what they're doing. We're all figuring it out. We're all humans for the first time.

00:00:00:00 – Cold Open

00:03:29:08 – Intro

00:05:56:18 – Bady Dalloul

00:07:59:23 – Nada Debs

00:09:52:04 – Amad Mian

00:11:29:02 – Nadine Kanso

00:13:30:15 – Ricardo Karam

00:14:42:13 – Nez Gebreel

00:16:02:05 – Meshary AlNassar

00:17:11:24 – Outro

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