Coming from Beirut, Lebanon, a city in perpetual forward motion, Maya Moumne hasn’t always been interested in indulging in the act of reflection. But, she did experience an intense feeling of creative grief following the completion of a personal photography project she’d worked on for a year. “This project explored the idea of collective memory and collective identity. I’d spent a year researching, thinking and creating these photographic works, and when it was done, there was this void. I had a very palpable feeling of creative grief. After being so hyper-focused on something, it was gone, and I had this sense of panic.” Maya felt this loss of purpose that Natasha talked about and moved quickly to fill the void by diving into a new project with the person who would eventually become her partner in Studio Safar, Hatem Imam. “At that age, it didn’t feel good to have this emptiness and in a way I distracted myself from the discomfort with more ideas and ambition, and for a while that was great because it led to starting the studio and the magazine.”
Having moved to Montréal after the devastating blast that destroyed vast areas of Beirut in 2020, Maya has found the quieter pace of life in this new city has allowed her the space to explore difficult emotions and experiences, which has contributed to a more productive and creatively rich period in her life. “My work is rooted in discussing my home region and, for a while, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to talk about it from here. But actually, in Montréal I have the time and the space to confront my past issues. I’m experiencing a whole new creative process in Montréal.”
Today, she’s more comfortable sitting with this grief and exploring what it has to teach her. Now, she looks at these quiet times, or more complex emotions, as opportunities to learn and grow professionally alongside the relatively new practice of embracing self-compassion. As she explains, “A very big realisation for me has been that extending kindness to yourself goes a really long way. And acknowledging one’s past, something that I would have previously seen as a weakness, has been really life-changing.”
