NewsLab

Lebanese photographer Rima Maroun has officially been announced as the winner of the Anna Lindh Euro-Med Award for the Dialogue between Cultures in 2008, the Anna Lindh Foundation said Tuesday. The Award, which is bestowed and voted on by the members of the Anna Lindh Foundation’s networks of civil society present in over 30 countries, recognizes this year the contribution of art in promoting mutual understanding in the Euro-Mediterranean region.

The third edition of the Euro-Med Award for Dialogue between Cultures, an initiative of the Anna Lindh Foundation and its partner Fondazione Mediterraneo, was launched back in April 2008, with nominations received from civil-society organizations across the region. For the very first time in this year’s edition, members of the Anna Lindh Foundation region-wide network, totaling close to two thousand civil-society organizations, participated in electing Maroun as the winner.

“If I try to create an artistic work, it is because I am convinced that arts calls for real dialogue, real listening and real sharing; that it is one of the rare places where people can meet their human side,” stressed Rima who, in addition to being a photographer, is also a talented young playwright and theater performer.

Among her exceptional art works is the photographic project called “Murmures” [whispers] produced in 2007 in the village of Qana, situated in Southern Lebanon, where Rima photographed the daily life of a family of survivors after the Israeli war against Lebanon in the summer of 2006. This year Maroun’s Murmures was exhibited in many countries like Syria and France.

Maroun has been appointed good will ambassador by the Anna Lindh Foundation