QM
The new QM review, launching in both digital and print formats, aims to become a meeting point for knowledge, inspiration and reflection. Working alongside artists, thinkers, creators and cultural figures, QM seeks to outline the foundations of a shared, forward-looking Mediterranean that unites and propels us as a cultural community.
The Mediterranean: What myth do we want?
The first QM monograph seeks to reflect on the myth of the Mediterranean, not only to deconstruct it, but also to uncover shared values that can guide us toward a renewed narrative of who we are and where we want to go. In the spirit of our region’s secular tradition, it offers an agora where voices from across the Mediterranean can meet, speak freely, and rethink who we are—together
A myth of harmony and diversity under scrutiny
For centuries, the Mediterranean has been imagined as a space shaped by a unifying myth—a place of cultural, linguistic, and human harmony fostered through ongoing, fruitful exchange between its peoples and shores. All Mediterranean cultures are the result of constant contact: made of meetings and farewells, borrowings and thefts, agreements and conflicts, open hands and clenched fists.
Manuel Forcano
QM, an IEMed’s Review on Mediterranean Thought and Culture
IEMed’s Executive President, Senén Florensa
Managing Director, Roger Albinyana
Director of the Culture, Gender and Civil Society Department, Gemma Aubarell
QM’s Advisory Board: Lola Bañón, Hélé Béji, Thierry Fabre, Hani Hassan, Carme Portaceli, Isona Passola, Mònica Rius, Chaimaa Ramzy
Monograph nº38 coordinator: Manuel Forcano
QM Editorial Team: Mariona Rico, Lisa Hamou, Sergi Doladé, Jordi Bertran, David Rodríguez Seoane
Header photo: Toni Catany. Meknès, Morocco, 1989. © Fundació Toni Catany
Explore the monograph…
Mediterranean Humanism
Discover a lucid meditation on the fading myth of the Mediterranean, once imagined as a bridge of civilizations, now fractured by disillusion. Yet within this rupture lies a call to renewal: a plea to rebuild human connection beyond nostalgia and illusion.
Hélé Béji
Mediterranean tragedies and future myths
Look into the Mediterranean’s mirror, a sea where shared dreams and divisions coexist. Between beauty and tension, encounter and loss, it reflects the contradictions of our time and the fragile hope of reimagined unity.
Hani Hassan
Amid myths, stories and dreams
Journey through the Mediterranean as a living tapestry of memory, politics, and imagination. This reflection invites you to navigate its layered myths and fluid borders, uncovering the human stories that keep reweaving its meaning.
Thierry Fabre
The place where faces merge
Enter a poetic meditation on the Mediterranean as a way of being in the world, a space where identities flow, memories intertwine, and movement becomes belonging. Beyond borders and nationalisms, it invites us to rediscover the humanity that connects its shores.
Zineb Mekouar
Women, A Constant Presence around the Mediterranean Sea
Although history is written by men, the presence of women is also palpable, from the most ancient legends to today, when they assert themselves as visible players in the life of their countries.
Sophie Bessis
New Wars in Old Seas. A New Dream of Mediterranean peace?
Today, it is no longer possible to begin a text on the Mediterranean with sentences about a bygone era of prosperity and well-being. Thus, if “peace” is a category at all, in our time when it feels most distant, anything we write will inevitably bear the shadow of an apocalypse
Serhan Ada
Voices
Interviews, conversations, podcasts, and musical proposals that complement the articles of the monograph on the Grand Tour and Orientalism as driving forces of a perhaps outdated Mediterranean myth. “Voices” lets us hear the secrets and voices of Mediterranean thinkers, artists, and cultural agents, expanding on the topics and content explored in the various languages of the Mediterranean
From Myth to Responsibility: When Amin Maalouf Talks to the Mediterranean
Enter a reflection where Amin Maalouf reimagines the Mediterranean as a living symbol of dialogue and diversity, a call to rediscover coexistence in a world ever more connected yet deeply divided.
A Homage to the Mediterranean through Music and Myth
Journey through sound with Orpheus 21, Jordi Savall’s musical odyssey that unites voices from medieval Italy, Syria, and Kurdistan to evoke love, exile, and the shared memory that binds the Mediterranean.
Adnan Özer’s Overflowing Mediterranean: Turkish Poetry in the Back-and-Forth of Myth
Immerse yourself in a poetic sea where Adnan Özer unveils an intimate and restless Mediterranean — a place where body, exile, and desire intertwine to rewrite its myth through memory and emotion.
From Myth to Body: The Sensitive Geography of Elizabeth Grech
Sail through the verses of Elizabeth Grech, where desire, loss, and memory flow together to reshape the Mediterranean as a living experience of exile, femininity, and resilience — a sea of emotions constantly transforming.
Perspectives
Documentaries and film selections engage in dialogue with articles and photo essays capturing the essence of the Mediterranean myth—both the present and the future. Miradas invites us to observe the world deeply, deconstructing and rebuilding a visual narrative that enriches the magazine’s content.
A Visual Archive of Toni Catany: “La meva Mediterrània” (My Mediterranean)
Fundación Toni Catany
Through Toni Catany’s lens, the Mediterranean becomes intimate, plural, and profoundly human. In La meva Mediterrània (1991), he created a visual archive of emotion and light, revealing a living sea woven from journeys, memories, and shared beauty.
Tales of a Restless Sea: Documentary Narratives of the Mediterranean
This selection unveils new Mediterranean narratives — migrant, political, and poetic voices that rewrite its myths through memory, resistance, and renewal. A journey across a sea in motion.
The Mediterranean, an Actor on the Big Screen
Cinema turns the Mediterranean into a living character, a mirror of beauty and conflict, memory and myth. From Cabiria to The Big Blue, it reimagines this sea as both dream and frontier.
Ink that persists : Palestinian comics against oblivion
A visual journey through Palestinian comics as acts of memory and resistance. Through exile, everyday life, and the struggle to exist, these works reclaim and redraw the Mediterranean’s silenced narratives.
Dialogues
Egypt Between Fable and Truth: A Conversation with Filmmaker Sherif El Bendary
Through Sherif El Bendary’s gaze, the Mediterranean sheds its idealized harmony to reveal its fractures and inequalities. Rooted in Cairo and infused with magical realism, his cinema amplifies the voices of the marginalized, transforming everyday absurdity into a mirror of post-revolutionary reality and human resilience.
Cinema in the Face of the Myths of a Homogeneous Mediterranean
In conversation with Ricard Zapata, this piece explores how cinema preserves migration memories and reimagines the Mediterranean as a shared emotional geography. Through film, we confront stereotypes, recover silenced stories, and reflect on the borders, visible and invisible, that define our collective history.
Theatre and the Myth of the Mediterranean: A Talk with Carme Portaceli
Carme Portaceli reimagines theatre as a living space of Mediterranean memory, where tragedy meets humour, and collective wounds find voice through art. In her vision, the stage becomes a shore of encounter, preserving dialogue, tolerance, and the fragile beauty of shared resilience.
Narratives
“Speak and Look”: A Symphony of Women Writers for a New Vision of the Mediterranean
Through new female voices, the Mediterranean is reread by migrant women writers, heirs of Assia Djebar, who turn silence into voice. Their stories make the sea a space of transit, resistance, and encounter, challenging stereotypes.
Meritxell Joan
Fatima Mernissi, the Weaver of the Mediterranean
Fatima Mernissi (Fez, 1940 – Rabat, 2015) was able to use her creative thread to unravel stories of activism and resistance and courageous feminism, and to open unexpected paths in the intimate relationship between gender, religion, culture and power.
Twelve stories to imagine the Mediterranean
In line with its commitment to intercultural dialogue and to culture as a driver of social change, QM incorporates the finalist stories from the latest edition of the literary contest A Sea of Words into its editorial programme through a serialized publication.
Does a Judeo-Christian Europe Exist?
Journalist and historian Sophie Bessis, specialised in relations between the North and the South of the Mediterranean and QM contributor, speaks with poet and expert in Semitic Philology Manuel Forcano about the idea of a “Judeo-Christian civilization” and the historical, cultural, and political implications of this concept in today’s context.
IEMed also recommends
The Renewed Value of Cultural Diplomacy in Euro-Mediterranean Relations
Cultural diplomacy is not reduced to a tool of influence but rather consists of genuine cooperation centred on mutual understanding and shared values, beyond state agendas, explains Gemma Aubarell in this contribution to the IEMed Mediterranean Yearbook 2025.
Women, Culture and the Path Toward Equality
On the occasion of International Women’s Day 2026, we are bringing together inspiring voices from across the Mediterranean to highlight how culture can advance gender equality. Journalists, writers, poets and artists reflect on the role of creativity, knowledge, and dialogue in shaping more inclusive and equitable societies.
Pens and cartoons; the Arab comic in movement
The IEMed collaborate with this exhibition which aims to provide an “overview of current comics and graphic novels in the Arab world through 23 works produced from 2007 to 2015, all very representative of the creative response by Arab writers and illustrators to the social and political transformations occurring over the last decade.”
With the support of
