Modc/ka can be written with a C, or with a K, since it’s random, and since we are not even sure which alphabet to use.

 

Modca is not about the memory of a café that doesn’t exist anymore in Beirut on Hamra Street. Modka is more about random talks and encounters that used to happen by chance there, on the noisy side-walk. It is about random encounters that gave birth to random talks that might have still continued to happen there, or elsewhere, in any other café, in another city, or even, a place that is hardly a city, and not in a café, a random side-walk talk. Modca is perhaps a project which might be born out of such talks.

 

It is about the unconditional love for randomness and what this might bring of good surprises. Modca might have been a corner, a sidewalk, a vitrine that you might have seen while walking without a clear destination, somewhere. Modc/ka is this place, visited by visual artists, writers, thinkers, and they concubine in an old house, which happened to be from 1820, and has witnessed at least two World Wars.

 

Modka is originally an island where the coffee was grown, in Yemen, then it became a name for coffee, taken or maybe imported by the Italians from the Modka harbor.

 

Modka is a house, from where art and culture not only from Beirut, or Yemen, or Italy, or the Netherlands are to be pl. It’s also a writing platform.

 

It is a home, a living room with a vitrine, allowing doubt, conviviality, random encounters, cooking, singing, posting ideas.

 

Modca was also a butchery by chance, traces of pointy meat hangers, of horse corpses still pend from its ceiling, and then Modka was the house and the working space of a shoe-maker in Zutphen, a man who made shoes in the space, even on the darkest days of the year, a shoe must have been repaired, or made.

 

In Modca, we would like to be lazy, do afternoon naps, we would like to watch films, wash textiles, stitch, host performances, cook food and eat it, drink coffee, feed friends and visitors, sleep, be playfull, think of self-care, care in times of pandemics, connecting art and all the ideas that we would like to work with, randomly.

 

Modka has three languages, but in fact, it has many more, and no language as well. Modca can be mute, but it can also be a very noisy space. Can we call it an art space?
 

A poet in Modka once said: 'There's nothing left but playfulness! Come on then!'.