Place In Place Of: Alexandria
Posted on January 6th, 2008 in project news
I’ve been invited to Alexandria, Egypt by the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) to work on a site-specific project, as well as lead a workshop with local art and architecture students. I’ve begun a web site for the project here: http://alexandria.placeinplaceof.net. I’ll also be posting photos regularly on Flickr to this photo set.
Here’s a somewhat “official” blurb about my anticipated work:
Pedestrian histories suggest a multiplicity of stories and perspectives from which to consider a place, from which to consider Alexandria and the people who inhabit it. These petites histoires, or minor histories, depend upon the itineraries and movements of inhabitants between static points of rest (places) within the city. They are performed anew with each subject, with each singular instance, although paths will often be repeated, practiced, refined, cross-referenced in the process. Pedestrian histories possess a pacing, a slowness, a particular kind of looking, and are instrumental in the creation of political, historical, cultural, social, and vernacular spaces. Borrowing from Michel de Certeau’s writing on spatial stories, this project locates pedestrian histories at the intersection of the map and the tour, somewhere between what de Certeau calls “a place projection totalizing observations [and] a discursive series of operations.” As an artist-tourist encountering Alexandria for the first time, this conceptual pairing (these touristic tropes) also presents a useful framework with which I can enter Alexandria and perform my own pedestrian histories in the city as I research countless others present there.
As an addendum to the loose network of site-specific and web-based Place In Place Of projects, Place In Place Of: Alexandria will manifest itself as a set of site-specific interventions, performances, and documents. Equally important and essential, this project will be co-created as a collaboration between myself and local art and architecture university students. The research and documentation will be collected, reconstituted, and recontextualized on the Web at http://alexandria.placeinplaceof.net; the online component to the project functions as a translation that attempts to connect the Web and Web users to physical localities from disparate geographies and cultures.
Place In Place Of: Alexandria is being created for CLEOTRONICA 08, a new media festival organized by ACAF in Alexandria, Egypt which will take place in the first half of 2008. CLEOTRONICA is envisioned as “a space for both cultural dialog and alternative methods of education, research and collaboration by focusing on establishing an extensive workshop program which will invite international artists, designers, artist collectives and independent art spaces from different contexts to work with local artists, art students and cultural workers.”
