I’m not exactly sure why a sort of Homeric haze inhabited by deities and epic figures seeped into my 2026 summer like the scent of ambrosia as I raced against seasonal and regional odds to meet delivery deadlines.
Was it my short but very Greek holiday? Aeolus blowing us dizzy through the Cycladic fires? Or the burning memory of Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood Odyssey? Or that book I couldn’t shake, with its Canadian-Egyptian author’s impossible journey from East to West? Was it the long road travelled alongside my favourite pop legend, still releasing her best music at 67? Or the invitation to participate in Homo Faber, the ultimate stop on a craft journey? The answers matter less than the reflections these questions raise, about our own mythologies and how we compose them to make sense of the odysseys we embark on.
Why wouldn’t daily drives between distant workshops under the burning Cairo sun, endless email chains, unreliable political environments, or care for family and friends feel like a proper Odyssey? Could Zeus, Madonna, Christopher Nolan and recognition from institutions such as Homo Faber be some of the missing links binding our personal mythology?
Webster’s Dictionary defines the word as “an allegorical narrative”, and while I guess we all know what mythology is supposed to mean, I spent summer hours being reminded of the allegories we find in the stories we inherit, invent and repeatedly reshape to give meaning to experiences that might otherwise be impossible to navigate.

I can think of many people who had to abide by this observation but the Lebanese are up there. Talk about adapting to impossible circumstances and clinging to myths in order to get by. The Lebanese have a particular talent for responding to tragedy with a panache I haven’t really witnessed anywhere else. I often wonder what it is about Lebanon that has fostered such an extraordinary passion for commerce, food, design, art and life itself. Geography is often the answer but could a reverence for creative excellence be an antidote to the helplessness produced by forces beyond one’s control? Perhaps culture becomes its own form of resistance, much as the gods in Homer seem determined to keep Odysseus alive long enough to reach Ithaca.
I was born in Beirut but left as a toddler and never really lived there full-time. My mother’s family is from West Beirut, with roots in the capital stretching back through French and Ottoman rule and into the Lebanon of independence. Ironically, my mother eventually settled in Cairo after she and my father left France, while my sister married in Beirut and has lived there for more than thirty years.
My bond with Lebanon is therefore stronger than the sum of the days I have spent there. My French upbringing taught me to look at things from a certain distance, reinforced by the loss of my grandmother following the bombing of her husband’s building during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982. I have always tried to approach Lebanon, and perhaps conflict more generally, from something resembling the spirit of “Vous n’aurez pas ma haine”: not directed at one particular camp, but at anyone who stands on the destructive end of any story.
Perhaps this is why the story of Odysseus has never felt entirely remote to me. The circumstances may be mythological, but the emotional architecture is not: displacement, uncertainty, endurance, the need to believe that somewhere ahead there is still a home worth reaching.

Millions of people have now watched Christopher Nolan’s billion-dollar-grossing The Odyssey.
Having been raised by Jesuits with a mandatory Greek or Latin curriculum (I was team Latin), Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey felt less like ancient literature than like foundational operating systems for Western imagination. Even the casting debates and aesthetic anachronisms ultimately reinforce how mythology persists precisely because it is adaptable, absorbing each cultural moment into its narrative logic.
Another filmed odyssey of heroic proportions arrived around the same time in the second part of Antonin Baudry’s epic about General de Gaulle, whose extraordinary refusal to accept France’s defeat in 1940 and insistence on continuing the fight helped turn a historical figure into something approaching national mythology. His absolute conviction, maintained in near-total solitude against seemingly impossible odds, is perhaps what transformed him from a historical figure into one of those rare political characters whose life and subsequent mythology have become almost impossible to separate. Transmission itself becomes a form of survival: what is remembered, retold and transformed can outlive the circumstances that produced it.

Perhaps this is where the mythos within mythology becomes more complicated: when the story we construct begins to eclipse the history that gave rise to it. Embodying that tension, I came across a 2025 book by an Egyptian-Canadian-American author that had somehow escaped my radar until I spotted it, ironically not in Egypt but in my favourite Athens bookstore, Hyper Hypo.
Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a New York Times bestseller translated into several languages, seems to have arrived in France and Europe with remarkably little fanfare. The book can feel limited in its perspective and characteristically uncompromising in its exploration of the ways Western mythologies have been used to justify domination, while the realities of a world often gathered under the catch-all label of the Global South have been used to construct different kinds of walls. As El Akkad writes, “History always seems to start when westerners are harmed, not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled.” This basically asks who gets to decide when history begins and whose suffering becomes historically legible. And while the narrative around postcolonialism and the tragedies affecting Israel and Palestine often trades an understanding of the exact context of different times in history for vindication by manipulated masses on all sides, the book offers remarkably poignant perspectives from an intellectual Arab immigrant living and working in the West. A reminder of how easily the stories through which societies understand themselves can become instruments of brutal discord.

Perhaps nowhere has the mythology of self-invention been more powerful than in America. A nation built around the idea that origins need not determine destiny has produced an extraordinary number of stories about reinvention, from the immigrant arriving with nothing to the self-made millionaire, the movie star and the pop icon who turns a life into a legend.
Madonna may be the ultimate contemporary expression of that mythology. At 67, she continues to reinvent herself, release music and defy the cultural expiration dates that seem to apply so readily to everyone else.
Her Confessions 2 (namely One Step Away and Love Without Words) accompanied me as I drove between workshops through Cairo’s summer heat, and it made me think about the particular usefulness and pitfalls of such modern myths. For a child or teenager trapped by circumstances they cannot yet change, the mythology of the self-made life can be more than fantasy. It can be a provisional future, a reason to believe that the life you were given is not necessarily the life you will have. Of course, such mythology can also obscure some of the prerequisites for reaching such goals, notably nationality, social class and race.

One of those production drives led me to the Alousi family’s outstanding Cairo foundry, Bronze International. Artist Anas Al Alousi and his family travelled from Iraq when life there became impossible, eventually settling in Egypt, where he built what he describes as the largest bronze foundry in the world. Another journey between worlds turning circumstance into possibility.
After years of obsessively focusing on Egyptian alabaster, I saw an opportunity to explore another ancient material. Finding the Alousis in Cairo was almost serendipitous, and it led to an object I grew quite fond of: a bronze table lamp representing a discreet desert hero’s head, its ears and eyes rendered in Egyptian alabaster and designed in collaboration with Artificial Intelligence. The Fennec is not an ancient Egyptian reference and came up almost as a mascot but gradually became something more symbolically significant to me: a hypersensitive little superhero, part animal, part sculpture, part light. I like the intuitive collision of timelines: a hypersensitive animal evolved to survive the desert, re-imagined with the assistance of AI and translated into a bronze sculpture following classical methods. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Age of AI. Three radically different moments converging in one object and later in a series of objects that continue to bridge cultures and time.
Fennec will spark its/his/her/their ears and eyes this autumn, following my participation in Homo Faber in Venice this month.

Homo Faber is an international celebration of exceptional craftsmanship, bringing together makers from around the world and placing material knowledge, technical mastery and the human hand at the centre. The 2026 edition, An Island of Light, directed by an exceptional artist and stage designer I have admired for years, Es Devlin, takes over the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on San Giorgio Maggiore from September 1 to 30. At the studio we have crafted one of our largest monolithic URAEUS birth chairs for the occasion. Our tallest one yet will be displayed in Doha in November.
For anyone working with materials, Homo Faber is about as close to a dream destination as one can imagine. Present Egyptian craftsmanship has rarely occupied an international platform of this kind, which of course makes the opportunity particularly special as it can hopefully open doors for more craft from more diverse provenance. When I began working with Egyptian alabaster, part of the impulse was to take a material that had lost its luster being associated with tourist souvenirs and to make it contemporary, while reconnecting it with its historical and, indeed, mythical origins. Homo Faber seems like a perfect opportunity to place that work within a much larger history of making, alongside a new chapter involving bronze, artificial intelligence and my ongoing quest for truth and meaning.

With Zeus’s permission, Venice will not be a final destination. Although a first, it will be one of many more stops along a lifelong journey towards my Ithaca.

May we all find our own.

Omar