Monthly Archives: February 2008
Workshop Project 03: Performance
Posted on Feb 05, 2008 in workshop | Permalink
With time limited and the prospect of making public performances somewhat intimidating, on the last day we agreed to end the workshop with a collaborative performance in Alexandria. We decided to make a march, in single file, through the city from the Chatby neighborhood to Kom El Dika. Our seemingly mundane action elicited quite a response from the people that we passed ranging from the amused to the bewildered. Walking in Alexandria is often a frantic business which requires a great measure of agility to navigate the aggressive cars, torn-up streets and sidewalks, and throngs of other pedestrians. So, on the one hand, our group march made a definitive visual statement within the context of the city. The students noted their discomfort with this visibility and the potentially controversial political implications of our act: unified group activities in public in Egypt can be construed as subversive by the authorities and highly suspect, even illegal. But the rigid structure of our walk and movement through the city also, I think, changed our perception of the space and affected our thinking and conversations: our performance, our formation established a link with other types of collective actions and those histories. Our lines—the path we followed and the form we assumed—connected with a larger pattern of lines within Alexandria.
Group March to Kom El Dika
More:
Workshop Introduction
Workshop Project 01: Collection
Workshop Project 02: Intervention
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
Workshop Project 01: Collection
Posted on Feb 03, 2008 in workshop | Permalink
The first project in the workshop dealt with the idea of collection, specifically using the camera to build photographic collections of various recurrent aspects of Alexandria’s urban environment. Such collections constitute typologies of the city and reveal patterns and networks of meaning. Once isolated and singular elements gain significance through the shape that is created in their collected form, and can suggest new interpretations of the city.
View samples from the students’ collections:
Mohamed | Lamia | Abdalla | Aya | Monsour | Omar | Moushira
Mohamed Nabil, Street Signs
Mohamed noticed that many of the streets in Alexandria are named after persons whom he and most others have no knowledge of. His collection of these street signs reveals another history of the city, one largely unknown that is written in the public space of the streets.
Lamia Moghzy, Tram Graffiti
Silly names, notes to lovers, esoteric communiques… Lamia collected these snippets of vernacular writings-in-transit. Riding and waiting between destinations; these stories fill the spaces of mobility in Alexandria’s tram system.
Abdalla Safwat, Shop Signs
Abdalla was interested in the whole range of shop signs in Alexandria, from the high-style design to the more vernacular, which for him reveal the full spectrum of commerce in the city. Also, global and local issues collide in this terrain as small shops compete with multinational brands.
Aya Tarek, Numeric Notations
While working on a broader collection of graffiti writing on buildings, Aya soon focused on this system of cryptic numbers. Being indeterminate, they accommodate multiple interpretations but also offer an example of a very specific kind of language that perhaps only an initiated few can write or read—perhaps city employees or utility workers.
Mohamed Monsour, Electric Junction Boxes
Monsour made this collection of infrastructural nodes in Alexandria—the ubiquitous electric junction boxes which serves as connection points between the main power grid and branches that feed into each building in the city.
Omar Moustafa, Posted Signs
Omar’s collection consisted of these handwritten signs posted all over Alexandria. They represent a layer of personalized communications that broadcast a wide range of messages to the city’s inhabitants.
Moushira Elamrawy, Architects’ Nameplates
Many of the buildings built during the Belle Époque in Alexandria bear the mark of the architects’ and builders’ names on their facades, which Moushira collected for the workshop. Here is another layer of information written on the surface of the city that tells the city’s history and also marks changes within the architectural profession as well.
More:
Workshop Introduction
Workshop Project 02: Intervention
Workshop Project 03: Performance