Once Upon a Time: Narrate Your Story! – With Anwar AlKandari

In this salon, Anwar AlKandari will dive into: storytelling and our constant urge to seek meaning, forms of narratives we use, and digital storytelling.

“In the Ottoman times, there were itinerant storytellers called “meddah.” They would go to coffee houses, where they would tell a story in front of an audience, often improvising. With each new person in the story, the meddah would change his voice, impersonating that character. Everybody could go and listen, you know ordinary people, even the sultan, Muslims and non-Muslims. Stories cut across all boundaries.”
― Elif Shafak

It’s in the nature of humanity to be storytellers and meaning seekers, and it goes way back to history even before languages came into existence. As Jonathan Haidt puts it, “human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor”. And to say that narrating stories have an undeniable effect on us is no surprise – when you sell an object and tell its story, it’s a guarantee that people will be more willing to pay for it (think of the auctions on art pieces as an example).

To think of the ages you’ve been through as “chapters”, people in your life as “major/minor characters”, and what you do as “hero’s mission” increases your awareness on how you’re narrating your story to yourself and presenting it to others. But why do we tell, and seek, stories? In this salon, we will dive into:

• What are the different forms of self-narratives and expressions?
• Where do we run into stories (people, buildings, trees, objects, artworks, etc…)? And how to become more aware of them?
• In this time especially, how are we dealing with the concept of digital storytelling?
• How do we become better storytellers and listeners to other stories? And how do others’ narratives affect ours?

Note: towards the end of the salon, we will have a story time (yay!) – each attendee will bring a valuable object (could be more than one) and tell the story it has been through.

Looking forward to explore this, and more, with you in the salon!

Good to read or watch before the salon:

• If trees could speak | Elif Shafak
• The politics of fiction | Elif Shafak
• How stories shape our minds | The science of storytelling | BBC Ideas
• Storytelling With Sound
• It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories
• Explore objects and archives from the Science Museum

Time zones:

• 7:00 PM in London
• 8:00 PM in Berlin/Paris
• 9:00 PM in Dubai
• 2:00 PM in New York
• 11:00 AM in Los Angeles/San Francisco

Why not add the ii Calendar to your calendar?

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