Workshop Project 02: Intervention
Posted on Feb 05, 2008 in workshop | Permalink
The second project in the workshop required students to make an intervention within some public site in Alexandria. An intervention may consist of a slight change, alteration, mark, occupation, insertion, and/or deletion in a specific site. These actions have the potential to change a passerby’s perception or use of the space, provoke a reassessment, create a fork in the road, if only to briefly interrupt someone’s habitual pattern. Also, such actions change the intervener’s own relationship to the city, to a specific place.
View selected documentation of the students’ interventions:
Lamia | Mohamed | Abdalla | Aya & Omar | Monsour
Lamia Moghzy, Phone card mosaic
Using another collection—discarded mobile phone cards—Lamia began to repair a broken mosaic with her own.
Mohamed Nabil, New street names for Alexandria
After collecting images of street signs with the names of unknown persons, Mohamed posted a map of Alexandria with street names of his own invention. As we looked at the map, we realized that it presented an opportunity for us and other passersby to add new street names to the map as well.
Abdalla Safwat, “Gaps” in the sidewalk
Abdalla was interested in altering how pedestrians might navigate through a space. He positioned these black strips on the sidewalk in an attempt to changes their typical passage here. The strips also began to record the texture of the paving and passersby’s footprints.
Aya Tarek & Omar Moustafa, Accident
After a minor car accident that forced their car up the curb here (no one was hurt!), Omar and Aya marked the site with spraypaint, thus noting their accidental but dramatic intervention in this public space on the side of the busy corniche road.
Mohamed Monsour, Electric junction boxes personified
In the course of his documentation of the electric junction boxes, Monsour came to think of them as unique characters that exhibited certain personalities. This cluster of boxes suggested to him further this personification as well as possible conversations between them, which he intimates with the addition of blank dialogue clouds.
More:
Workshop Introduction
Workshop Project 01: Collection
Workshop Project 03: Performance