What if wisdom is not stored in books, but carried between people?
Inspired by the historical House of Wisdom in Baghdad, theatre maker Enkidu Khaled reimagines Bayt al-Hikma as a nomadic artistic laboratory where artists, researchers, performers, and participants from different lived realities come together through collective creation.
In a world marked by fragmentation, war, displacement, and inherited wounds, we ask: can we create new Houses of Wisdom? To transform knowledge into a shared living practice, and to collectively rehearse other possible futures.
The laboratories of Bayt al-Hikma are temporary spaces for encounter, where knowledge is collected through listening, imagination, translation, mistranslation, and shared artistic processes. Gradually, we develop a collective artistic methodology: a way of working shaped through accumulated knowledge, lived experience, and exchanges between different disciplines and social realities. A methodology that can later be carried, adapted, and reactivated in other places and communities. They are spaces of plurality and healing, in which individual trauma is transformed by engaging in collective wisdom creation.
Here, Wisdom/Hikma, takes human form in a collaborative fiction. Through her we reflect on the past, and speculate on the future. Hikma carries shared knowledge from one gathering to the next: fragments of memory, stories, contradiction and experience. An embodiment of co-created wisdom, Hikma is manifold, ephemeral and infinitely human.
The project is collectively developed and archived by Enkidu Khaled, Leila Anderson, and Betina Abi Habib, whose practices intersect through participatory art, performance, scenography, public art, and collective storytelling.
The doors of the laboratory remain open. Each gathering welcomes new voices, practices, and forms of knowledge. Bayt al-Hikma is not a fixed collective, but a growing constellation of people engaged in a shared artistic inquiry.
At the core of the project is a simple question:
How can we grow wiser and more resilient, by learning from each other?
