An Interview That Refused to Stay Comfortable, and an Institution That Ran It Anyway.

Abdo Shanan is an Algerian-Sudanese photographer and visual artist based between France and Algeria. The conversation was meant to explore his creative process and his self-publishing practice.

A couple of questions in, it went somewhere harder. ‘I don’t know who I am,’ he said, describing the moment his family realised they had been uprooted. The conversation moved on to why Arabic literary publishing never made room for him, and whether belonging is inherited or decided.

The decision

Let it go where it was going, then defend it upstairs.

The easy call is to steer an interview back to the brief, or to publish the safe half and keep the institution comfortable. I co-conducted, produced and edited it for AFAC’s editorial programme, and it ran in full on the institutional platform, in both Arabic and English. Knowing what an artist should not be asked to soften is the same instinct as knowing what a brand should not say.

What happened

It reached a wide readership through a funder’s own channels.

An arts fund publishing something that unresolved, under its own name, is not the default. The interview is the piece I point to when the question is whether editorial judgement and institutional communications can be the same job.