This module explores imprints of the art(s) in shaping urban social-cultural landscapes. Participants will examine the power dynamics of the social and the political as they are narrated in realms and levels of the official, the subversive, the planned, the improvised, the individual, the collective, the imagined and the illusory. They will engage with the notion of public accessibility of art, while exploring charged pockets within the city that are not necessarily public or accessible. The module also investigates how artistic approaches and cultural interventions interpret placemaking policies and ambitions, as well as how they respond to city representation across various mediums and diverse cultural and contemporary curatorial practices.
Expand their toolbox by adding new – and unconventional - research tools to engage the city users in the co-production of knowledge.
Comprehend the possibilities for alternative processes of making sense, reading, and build in-depth understandings to the complexity of the networks that connect the different users, and how does that shape and govern city spaces (gender, socio-economics, social dynamics, formal/ informal relationships, city memory, conflicts, narratives… etc.).
Acquire abilities to communicate and understand the users’ perspectives in producing and appropriating city spaces.
Capitalize on the potentials of the existing dynamics through learning from the surrounding, rather than rushing to fixed solutions.
Since the way of producing art is by default interdisciplinary, the students from different disciplines will learn to engage in a collective research project, where each plugs in by their own knowledge, to complement one another.
Chirine El Ansary is an accomplished storyteller, performance artist, and researcher, born in Cairo. She holds a PhD in Practice-as-Research and an MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Theatre and Performance. Chirine also studied theatre at the American University in Cairo and the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School in Paris. Her work delves into the fusion of words and movement to create immersive atmospheres, evoke deep emotions, and craft vivid imagery. Central to her performances is the exploration of how people interact with the spaces they occupy, as well as the delicate boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary, memory and imagination.
Agnes MichalczykAgnes Michalczyk is a Polish-Austrian visual artist and educator living and working in Cairo. Graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig where she studied painting and printmaking she teaches at the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Arts at the German University in Cairo. Her work explores the urban space of Cairo through a female perspective focusing on the city and its narratives, real or imagined. She works in a variety of media, painting, drawing, and collage, between 2012-2016 mainly focusing on Street Art and since 2014 increasingly incorporating New Media in her practice contributing to different art projects in Cairo and abroad. Agnes is currently pursuing her doctoral research on immersive media and heritage in historic Cairo at Freie Universität Berlin and The University of Edinburgh.