Words by Danielle Pender. Photography by Mary Kang

The last time I saw Céline Semaan face-to-face was in January 2020 when she was hosting Study Hall in New York, the fashion and sustainability conference that she runs with her team at Slow Factory—an open education institute and research lab. The pandemic broke out not long after we said our goodbyes and the world changed forever, but the issues and topics discussed on the Study Hall stage in early 2020 still resonate today; if anything, they’re even more urgent than they were then. “I was re-watching the New York Times Study Hall recently because I wanted to grab a few pieces of info from it,” Celine tells me, “and you know, even with what’s happened in the pandemic, everything we said back then was prophetic.”

The 2020 Study Hall conference was a huge moment, not just for Céline and her team but also for everyone in the room and the thousands of people watching live worldwide. It was a chance to really get to grips with the fashion industry’s environmental issues beyond the usual surface-level talking points. The sessions covered topics ranging from waste-led design and transforming the global workforce to how community and culture can impact sustainability. The programme elevated voices from the global south, indigenous voices and brought together NASA scientists with cultural icons such as actress and advocate Yara Shahidi and Tina Knowles (yes, the Tina Knowles). This is the beauty of what Céline does. She understands the power of community not just on the ground but across industries, countries, and cultural divides because she understands at a very fundamental level that without each other, nothing is possible. This is a lesson she learned at a young age.

Growing up in 1980s Lebanon during the war, Céline’s childhood memories are bittersweet. “On one hand, I remember my childhood as being warm and beautiful, but at the same time, there were terrifying moments that I didn’t have the language to understand or process. It’s a feeling or emotion of being very frightened, being forced to stretch beyond my comfort levels.”

Céline fled Beirut with her immediate family for Montréal, leaving behind a wider family of beloved aunts, uncles and cousins. Like anyone fleeing a warzone, this extremely traumatic experience has had a lasting effect on Céline when it comes to feeling grounded in one place; as she explains, “In my roots, I have the soil of Lebanon, but I had to uproot, so I’ve always imagined myself as a terrarium, kind of floating around. But my ancestors were Bedouins, they were nomadic, so I make my peace with this feeling through that knowledge.” This formative experience also gave her an outlook that allows her to see outside of herself and any nation. “When I saw the Earth from the window of an aeroplane as a kid, my connection to places felt universal. I still really feel that sense of universality.”

 This sense of interconnectedness and interdependence is at the core of everything that Céline and Slow Factory do; as she tells me, “Interdependence is how nature works. We are all dependent on one another. A colonial mindset is to silo everything and everyone. It’s to segment and master one piece of the puzzle without understanding the whole picture. Eastern philosophies and ancient wisdom understand the importance of interconnectedness, but this has been lost from the modern Western way of thinking.” 

When you look around at our increasingly atomised society, it’s not hard to see why this interconnected approach to life isn’t the majority mindset. The colonial strategy of divide and rule that has been in place for centuries has left deep scars and distrust. It has created wars, hostile borders and violent government policies. It has meant that food and fuel supplies are precarious essentially because of logistics, fear and greed. This siloed way of being is also replicated across the technology we use that was initially meant to bring us all together.

When I ask Céline what is stopping us from adopting a more globally connected mindset, she explains, “Colonialism is the problem, capitalism is the problem, white supremacy is the problem. We’re up against a narrative that a lot of people believe to be the truth. To counter that and to create a paradigm shift, we’re working hard at Slow Factory to offer a new way of thinking.” This is difficult when faced with the monopoly tech and media companies have on the information we consume today. Céline continues, “It’s hard, you know?! This current narrative of the way things have to be is communicated through the newspapers you read, it’s on the TV shows and news you watch, it’s in the selected books you have time to read, the social media you mindlessly scroll through—so we’re all brainwashed, and we don’t even know it. We don’t even have the luxury of time to notice it because we’re too busy working jobs to pay our rent and bills.”

But Céline has compassion. She isn’t interested in creating a culture of shame; she quotes bell hooks, who said, “Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.” Céline gets it; she herself has to live within this same structure and narrative. She has bills to pay and a finite amount of time. To counter this, Slow Factory offers an incredible programme of open education workshops, seminars, and lectures to catalogue lost knowledge and re-educate a new generation of people. Free and accessible to all, you can sign up to classes on land and indigenous politics, indigenous agriculture, regenerative design and radical futurism, and that’s just the A/W 21 programme. You can dive back into lessons on anti-colonial issues, culture, history, manufacturing, labour and racial justice. Basically, everything, as their tagline suggests, “What school won’t teach you.”

None of this is new for Céline. Since the early 2000s, Céline has been involved in open education, teaching digital literacy and design, but it wasn’t until 2013 that she joined all of the dots, and Slow Factory came into being. The experience of becoming pregnant with her first daughter gave Céline a chance to hit pause on her life in Montréal, “I never thought I was going to be a mom, so it really shook me to my core, but at the same time I gave birth to my daughter, I feel like I was giving birth to a new version of me.” She spent the first year of her daughter’s life back in Beirut with her husband Colin and wider family, considering which direction she wanted this new phase of her life to take. “I was just there, breastfeeding and thinking, and I drew a constellation in my notebook,” she tells me. “I connected the dots of everything I was interested in; anti-colonialism, open-education, access information, digital literacy, climate change, and so that is how Slow Factory came to be.” 

Since 2013, Slow Factory has organised several global Study Hall conferences and developed into an open education institute, an independent research lab, and a regenerative design incubator that teams designers with scientists and sustainability experts. 

Over the last 18 months, as the pandemic ripped back the curtain on the inequality millions of people were experiencing, Céline and her team at Slow Factory provided intelligent and well-researched commentary and content that helped people understand the magnitude of the situation worldwide. As everyone looked for a trusted voice amongst the hysteria and conspiracy theories, Slow Factory’s social media following grew rapidly, and wherever you were in the world, you saw re-shares and quotes from their account.

It was an intense period for Céline and her team, not only were they living through a pandemic themselves, but they were also absorbing, processing, and making sense of the social justice and environmental traumas that were taking place on a daily and weekly basis. Céline and her team stretched themselves to report on these issues and support their growing community, but the intensity took its toll, she says “I wasn’t aware that stretching myself and my team wasn’t a super-power, I thought it was normal because that’s what I’ve always done. But it is a super-power, and I pushed my team and myself too hard. I learned that when two of my team members left. It really forced me to figure out how I was going to live in the present moment because I wasn’t. I was in a constant trauma loop.”

The increased visibility that came in 2020 didn’t only focus on Slow Factory. Céline became the target of scrutiny she has always had to deal with—demands around and expectations of her to be perfect. To be the perfect activist, the perfect representative of the climate change movement, but Céline is none of these things. She rejects the activist moniker, “Because it’s misused by performative activism forgoing the real activists who risk their own lives,” and has always talked of the need to acknowledge the contradictions that we live in. That lives within us. 

This sense of ownership over anyone in the public eye comes from a very entitled position, and one Céline pushes back on wholeheartedly; she explains, “In society, there is a way to compensate for your inaction. Whatever you cannot do, you project onto another human to do it for you. That then becomes the role of the activist, the advocate; they become the scapegoat for whatever you can’t do personally. These figures are built up to be saints and become honourable. As this saint, you’re expected to sacrifice on behalf of everyone else; sacrifice your funds, your peace of mind, your life. You’re not allowed to work with the big brands, you can’t eat meat, you can’t travel, but everyone else can. It’s illogical. It’s an illusion, and it’s extremely patriarchal and colonial. I’m not a saint, I’m a human being, and I’m doing the most I possibly can. I’m stretching myself beyond my comfort levels, beyond anyone’s comfort levels.”

In July 2021, Céline took the decision to shut everything down for two weeks to regroup. Since leaving Lebanon as a child refugee, she had always found herself in a constant survival setting. “For people who have been through trauma, survival mode becomes the default,” she tells me. “It’s only recently that I’ve been able to take a full breath because my breathing has always been shallow. That was just my state, I didn’t even notice I was so tired. But then I realised my default setting shouldn’t be like that. You must be able to release and be grounded. I wanted to be on a different frequency.”

In an attempt to try and reset the balance, Céline took her family on a spiritual retreat that provided Céline with the space to deal with her own trauma and plan how she wanted Slow Factory and her life to continue. “I always see things as a gift, and in this situation, I was like, ‘what can I learn from this? How can I evolve? How can I grow?’”

The Slow Factory has always been bigger than Céline, but the team has grown to ten following the summer break and now incorporates healing at the centre of everything they do. It makes sense. You can’t get up every day to fight archaic systems and not care for yourself and those around you. A change has also come with the introduction of Jungwon Kim joining as part of the Leadership Collective as VP Strategy. Jungwon worked at Amnesty International and The Rainforest Alliance before joining Slow Factory; she’s well-versed in environmental and social issues and brings a deep spiritual focus with her. Having someone to lean on and offer guidance has been a key part of Céline’s healing process and something she’s grateful for; as she explains, “Jungwon is an incredibly wise woman and is devoted to spiritual activism. Within the culture of Slow Factory, we’re building and embedding a culture of healing, a rhythm that’s closer to nature. It’s another level of intelligence that a lot of indigenous people have spoken about or practised for centuries but that Western culture has forced out of everyone’s hearts. That’s why there’s so much pain. That spiritual understanding of the world is a muscle we must work on because our mind is limited, and if we just rely on this, we’re going to have limited solutions.”

Céline’s partner in both life and work: Colin has been an integral part of Slow Factory’s growth, driving forward the lab focus, as she explains, “Colin is more of our polymath genius; he’s an engineer, lawyer, musician and producer. Colin’s leadership allowed Slow Factory to scale into material science.”

With this new focus, Slow Factory is offering an invitation to a radical new way of thinking through their body of work. Céline and her team aren’t just asking us to recycle, reuse or repurpose. She isn’t interested in brands only using organic cotton or their latest green-washing campaign. Instead, Céline is asking bigger questions. She’s asking us to consider the validity of the narratives that we’ve always been told. She’s asking us all—governments, brands and individuals—to reimagine the systems that we live and operate within. She’s also asking us to consider our part in it all, and she’s asking designers to apply their expertise to deal with the natural disasters that are already upon us; tsunami’s, wildfires, floods.

This is what sets Céline and Slow Factory apart from a lot of, often, white-ran climate change platforms. Many lean into an apocalyptic hysteria, which I get—we’re in a bad place, and it can be absolutely terrifying to consider our collective futures—but there’s a bigger truth that Céline and her team understand, that the same tools that got us here aren’t going to get us out of this absolute mess.

There are big plans in the pipeline; fundraising, future Open Edu programmes for kids and a very exciting lab project in the works. At one of the 2019 Study Hall conferences, designer Mara Hoffman said we didn’t need a wardrobe update, we needed an entire consciousness upgrade. I ask Céline if she sees this happening any time soon. “It’s happening slowly but surely. It’s like if you take psychedelics—you see yourself evolve, you come out of your body and join the cosmos, but then you have to come back to your body, you’re still there. So this reckoning, this paradigm shift it’s happening. It’s just slow and painful, and we have to come back to reality. We’re so used to instant gratification, but this isn’t going to be instant.”

Since we last saw each other IRL in New York, the world has changed, and a lot of bad shit has happened but talking to Céline over Zoom, our pixelated faces side by side on the screen, I feel hopeful. Not a mindless hope that we latch onto to distract us from the horrific things going on, but a positive energy knowing that the constellation Céline drew on her notepad in Lebanon back in 2013 is now in action. The knowledge that is being catalogued and shared via each Open Edu class is mushrooming out. That knowledge is empowering people; it’s changing things. It’s inspiring action within a global majority. The thought of that global majority moving forward and breaking down the harmful systems that limit us is the energy we all need to take into 2022 and beyond.

This conversation features in Riposte #13 - The Care Issue. Click through to our shop to order your print copy.