Antonio Suleiman [work]

Antonio Suleiman is the creator your favorite creator follows. Quiet, precise, and undeniably evocative.

Born in Athens to a Palestinian-Lebanese father and a Greek-German mother, Suleiman’s biography reads like the setup for a geopolitical thriller. He spent his childhood between the orderly grid of Berlin and the sun-bleached chaos of Beirut. “In Berlin, the trains run by the second,” he told me over bitter Turkish coffee in his Lisbon studio. “In Beirut, the power runs by the whim of the neighbor. I learned early that stability is a myth, but rhythm is everything.” antonio suleiman

– Rather than simply stockpiling foreign reserves, Suleiman recommends a dynamic allocation model that adjusts based on a nation’s import dependency and debt maturity schedules. He famously argued that "a billion dollars in reserves is useless if it is denominated in a currency facing its own liquidity crisis." Antonio Suleiman is the creator your favorite creator

His next project, “The Bridge of No Return,” is scheduled for the 2026 Istanbul Biennial. It involves a full-scale reconstruction of a destroyed Ottoman-era bridge, suspended over the Golden Horn. But the bridge will be made of piezoelectric glass that generates a voltage with every footstep. As thousands of people walk across, the cumulative energy will power a single, massive speaker playing a 24-hour loop of a woman singing a lullaby in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). The identity of the singer is a secret. He spent his childhood between the orderly grid

After a brief stint as a consultant for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the early 2000s, Suleiman took a controversial step: he left the multilateral institution to join a private sovereign advisory group based in Abu Dhabi. Critics at the time accused him of "selling out" to Gulf capital. In retrospect, that move defined his career.