Back in the West and with our rhythms still a bit disrupted, we have to try to remember, to share, what these last two months in Cairo have been like, where we have been developing the first phase of the
Canal Canatun
project. The truth is that we have found ourselves for the first time in a totally different context from our own, with the fears that this entails in terms of intrusions and impositions of the good manners of “development” on “the other” supposedly underdeveloped, however we believe we have overcome this obstacle and perhaps thanks to the limitations of the language the work of the children of Ard El Lewa has been able to be many things but not directed and that has made us very happy.
The experience has become a collection of learning and challenges, we find it amusing that it was framed in an artist residency and that they tried to apply the parameters that define the field of art to a work that does not move in that direction -like when we were asked to do a test in order to measure artistic talent to select the candidates for the project-.
Artellewa
, the production and exhibition space directed by Hamdy Reda has been a place where we have felt very comfortable, surely because it is not what one imagines when thinking of an artistic production center, a mega-facility built or enabled with considerable budget items that continue to take more care of the container than the content despite its code of good practices and its proximity policies that in most cases respond to contrived positions because now “it is what is expected”. Artellewa is the home of Hamdy and his family, a welcoming space from where, without many resources but with the intention of promoting new dynamics in a stigmatized context with all the clichés of the urban peripheries, artists are offered a space from which to work and get to know the territory and in turn from where the neighborhood can have access to other modes of knowledge production.
In this context, proposing a participatory investigation on public and domestic spaces has been a luxury, as well as working with Ahmed, Asma, Aya, Samar, Sara, Fatma, Rashdan, Aleix and Karim… each of them has used their blank book as a field notebook to collect impressions and focus on the topics of interest that would become the axes of the study
Some of the images from these notebooks can be found on our flickr. The notebook divided into two sections differentiated the public from the domestic with four sub-sections: characters, actions, spaces and dreams. All the annotations have been shared weekly, opening new possibilities to build discourses collectively. Artellewa became a production and resource center for the team, which has mapped the streets, photographed and recorded the day-to-day life of the district.
On December 24 we took advantage of not having to fulfill the family commitments of the Catholic tradition to present some of the materials that had been produced during our stay, a moment of encounter that was enlivened by an improvised musical trio.
This is only the beginning of a process that we hope will consolidate ties and open new possibilities to learn collaboratively and horizontally, Insha’Allah. It has been possible to launch Canal Canatun thanks to the exchange grant awarded by Artellewea and the
Centre d’Art i Natura de Farrera
and the support of the
Consell Nacional de la Cultura i de les Arts
.