Posted on August 1, 2008 in musings
Posted on July 7, 2008 in musings
I’ve finally gotten around to starting No One Sleeps in Alexandria by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, a contemporary novel set in WWII-era Alexandria by (obviously) an Egyptian author. Many of my Egyptian friends and acquaintances highly recommended the book for providing a contrasting view of the the city, one to supplement the colonial perspective that I struggled to deal with during my preparation for and time in Alexandria earlier this year. Once again, literature about and memory of place become emeshed as I read Meguid’s book, and I’m roaming the city in memory along with the characters in the book. Alexandria and my friends there are on my mind. Among the scraps of my digital notes, I found a partial list of “Things Observed and Learned” in Alexandria—more memory:
I see an interesting connection between this ad hoc list and No One Sleeps in Alexandria: amid the narrative of the city and Magd al-Din, a peasant who brings his wife and child to Alexandria after being exiled from his village, Meguid inserts news-clip fragments that offer a kind of survey of contemporaneous local and global events during the period. Magd al-Din often reads aloud from the newspaper to his friend Dimyan, and these passages intimate Magd al-Din’s interest in the news of the world, but also speak to both the interconnectedness and discursiveness of world events as represented in the pages of newspapers:
[...] Hitler himself went to spend Christmas with his troops on the western front. Everyone wished victory for their peoples and their armies. The Finns will still scoring surprising victories. The League of Nations expelled Russia from its membership. Yusuf Wahbi screened his film Street Children in Cairo, where there was an increase in cases of typhoid fever. Many bottle of cognac, champagne, and whisky were sold in Alexandria, where nightclubs stayed open by candlelight to bid farewell to the old year. [...]
These events mingle with the everday narrative of life in the city, as memory binds the collective and individual together to form the texture of consciousness.
Posted on July 4, 2008 in activism, collaboration, musings, peripherals
Last week in Philadelphia, PennPraxis and the newly rebranded Central Delaware Advocacy Group (of which I have been a member for the past 2 years and have written in support before) publicly unveiled a 10 point action plan for implementing the nominally citizen-driven planning vision for the Central Delaware Waterfront. The event included commentary from city planning professionals and bureaucrats that also featured a climactic endorsement from Mayor Nutter, who pledged to begin implementing some early action items within the year. No small victory for many of us was Nutter’s reiteration of the fact that the proposed big-box casinos are antithetical to the kind of waterfront many of us are working to build.
Making visible the impact of the University of the Arts on land use in Center City Philadelphia and our role as active inhabitants of these spaces.
A set of site-specific interventions, performances, lectures and documents created in Alexandria, Egypt that included a workshop with local art and architecture university students.
Acting as both the Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Meaning (DIM) and the Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Radical Pedagogy (DIRP), much of my practice falls under the rubric of the Think Tank that has yet to be named.
Mapping and marking lost clothes found on the streets and sidewalks of Philadelphia.
A photographic series of Mess Punkt, or measuring points, reveals an alternative cartography of the city and the memory of my experience of it.
A series of projects which explores the socio-spatial divisions and potential connections between two adjacent districts in central Champaign that are bisected by the north-south railroad.
A web-based project which uses the weblog format to present concurrent and collaborative investigations and interpretations of Berlin.
A performative exploration of place, architecture, memory, provisional communities, provisional meanings, provisional monuments, the gloved hand of a construction worker swiping away gravel from a window sill...
Browse more links at del.icio.us/jbeau