Period
2010
Proposed by
Sarah Rifky
Location
Alexandria
About the project
The north coast of Egypt lies on the west coast of the city of Alexandria. It is a diverse region where timelines in history, demographics, class and diversity within its cultures span from the 20s (such as the ‘Agami’ resort, just to the western tip of the Alexandrian metropolis), the 40s (being the famous battle of ‘El – Alamein’ where the allies defeated Germany in WWII), to the 70’s and 80’s (seeing a rise in the socialist type architecture of the first modern leisure resorts in an attempt to boost local tourism beyond the congestion and population density of Alexandria’s stressed coast, during the summer holiday rush), then up until the present day building boom sweeping more and more of the coast year by year.
It is an area where the circular flow of money and wealth is regenerated during the summer months and suspends itself at a complete standstill during the rest of the year. Such activity during the summer months is considered an indicator of the country’s economic virility, in the sense that building and land prices inflate or deflate, and middle to upper-middle-class consumer behaviour can be detected within this laboratory-like isolation.
The question arises; whether such places are a useful case study to properly detect and/or research economic, urban, social and environmental change in Egypt. Such geographic isolation is void of the fluctuation and/or migratory demographic complexities that megacities like Alexandria and Cairo possess. So, in short, the summer on the north coast region can provide clear information through intentional behavioural characteristics performed year after year and summer after summer by both the residents’ yearly migration to such a resort and the life and culture of the locals who come from the local towns surrounding and embedded within the coastal region.
The project aims to create an audio-visual and textual laboratory on Egypt’s North Coast. The laboratory will be composed of a society of researchers and artists to discover, record and collect data from this site to produce an alternative scientific module (Archive) of the North Coast. Both the archive and the lab will serve as a platform for this society to delve further into the data collected, to deconstruct and reframe it to produce works (in the forms of video, writing, drawing etc.) that explore codes of representational forms, the phenomenological, and particularities of perception in the site of leisure. The project explores and researches the different agents, and how they work together to create systems which produce strange phenomena through interaction and affect.
External links
About the artist
Malak Helmy (b. Alexandria, Egypt, 1982) is based in Cairo, and her art focuses on video, text-based works, and collective initiatives. Much of Helmy’s video work visually references the new cultural and architectural constructs of her native Egypt, disputing their too-easy claim on reality and seeking a truer centre for psychical meaning.
