How to Make a Self-Portrait With Rocks

"How to Make a Self-Portrait With Rocks" is a lyric instruction manual that dissolves the boundary between body and landscape, self and sediment. Both intimate and geological in scale, this work reimagines the self-portrait as an encounter with matter, duration, and the limits of recognition.

Pairing Sara Elkamel’s spare, incantatory poetry with Dima Tannir’s stark, tactile rock images, the zine stages self-portraiture as a process of excavation rather than representation.

Produced as a limited edition print in B6 format, the zine unfolds into a poster, extending its conceptual gesture into the physical realm: what begins as a small, intimate object opens into a wider field of image and instruction.

About the Author

Sara Elkamel holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University, and currently lives in Cairo. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field of No Justice and Garden City.

Dima is a Lebanese graphic designer and a film researcher. Her work revolves around bridging the gap between Arab visual and design histories and contemporary design practices. Dima holds a degree in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut and a Master’s degree from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in cinema history and archives. Since 2020, she has worked and resides in Cairo, where she teaches Graphic Design at the German University in Cairo.