Culture Resource is pleased to announce the grantees of the second round of Wijhat 2023, a program that supports artists and cultural actors through travel grants that enable them to participate in artistic and cultural activities in the Arab region and abroad.
The Wijhat team received 72 applications for this round from Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia, Syria, Palestine, Kuwait, Algeria, Bahrain and Yemen. Of these, 51 were for international travel, 20 for regional travel and 1 for both international and regional travels. The jury selected 9 grantees.
Grantees:
Amany Atef, Egypt / dancer and theater director
Destination: Egypt → Senegal
Itinerary: Amany will take part in Training Diaspora Africa, a course that aims to strengthen the skills of its participants from Africa and the African diaspora and to initiate a permanent dialogue between those living inside and outside Africa. The course will focus on performance and the necessary tools to help performers develop their skills. This participation will give Amany the opportunity to broaden her familiarity with new dance techniques. It will also open new avenues for her as a choreographer through exchanges with other cultures from Africa and offer her insights into the challenges facing Africans in Senegal, a country rich in cultural diversity.
Association Euro-Méditerranéenne pour la Culture et les Loisirs, Tunisia, / an association for performing arts and street theater
Destination: Tunisia → Iraq
Itinerary: Members of the Euro-Méditerranéenne association will attend the Babel Street Arts Forum in Iraq where they present “Puppet Forum,” a show featuring gigantic puppets. They will also take part in a seminar in which participants will present their pioneering endeavors in street arts and street theater in such Middle Eastern countries as Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan, Morocco, Iran, Syria, Oman and Iraq. In addition, they will take part in training workshops on street art and theater work techniques and show production. The forum will conclude with a book-signing ceremony featuring newly published works on street arts and street theater.
Georges Cheikh, Lebanon / musician and buzuq maker
Destination: Lebanon → France
Itinerary: George will undertake several trips during which he will help train others in the manufacture of musical instruments, visit various string instrument manufacturers to familiarize himself with the latest manufacturing and maintenance techniques, and receive training in how to handle wood in its raw form. He will also visit the musician and composer Elie Maalouf who owns a large collection of buzuqs and similar string instruments that he had acquired in the course of his 30 year career. This will give George the opportunity to take measurements, examine the different woods and compare construction designs with an eye to imitating or building on them. In addition, he will visit students at the Conservatory of Savigny-sur-Orge music and dance in Paris who have been training on instruments he has made. He will present an introductory seminar on the musical and cultural heritage associated with the buzuq in which he will also discuss the role the individual has to play in the preservation of heritage. At some point during this project, George plans to show some antique and later model buzuqs to the music museum at the Cité de la Musique (Philharmonie de Paris) in the hope of persuading them to include these instruments as part of world heritage.
Lily Abi Chahine, Lebanon / multidisciplinary artist
Destination: Lebanon → Sudan
Itinerary: Lily will take part in the Extended Cities Art Residency organized by Muse Multi Studios. The residency, which takes place in Sudan and Lebanon, seeks to identify the basic themes that have shaped every city’s memory and present, with the aim of creating a visual approach to understanding one city from the perspective of others which, in turn, facilitates the appreciation of social, economic and political intersections. The project brings artists together to collaborate theoretically and practically in the production of artistic works that express these intersections. Lily will conduct a series of interviews with the inhabitants of Khartoum who will help her reconstruct a space that no longer exists. She will also meet with architects and urban planners and designers thereby gaining a better understanding of the urban fabric. Such activities are part of an oral archiving process that draws on verbal testimony in the absence of photographic testimony and visual archives.
Mai El Shazly, Egypt / visual artist and potter
Destination: Egypt → South Africa
Itinerary: Mai will travel to Johannesburg to take part in “Overwhelmed,” a collective art exhibition and forum on accumulated artifacts and remnants, the ornamentation on them and the legacy they carry. She will collaborate in an art project called “The Broken Trade Winds” which will be based on a study of the history of the raw materials used in African pottery and include archival investigations into materials introduced during the British colonial era, especially porcelain. The project will offer an analytical criticque of the role of trade during the British colonial period in West and Southern Africa in terms of the correlation between the growth of the use of porcelain and the manufacture of British style ceramics in Africa and the history of the slave trade in the countries of the African diaspora. The art work will consist of installations, printed materials and a video.
Mouhawalat Collective, Morocco / an art collective for multimedia projects
Destination: Morocco → France
Itinerary: The Mouhawalat team will attend an art residency at Triangle-Astérides, a center for contemporary art founded in Marseilles in 1994 with the purpose of developing dynamic and innovative media tools to render artistic content more widely accessible to diverse audiences. The team will develop Mouhawala 2: “Murshid”, a guide for young emergeant artists, offering them ideas and tools for responding to turmoil and breakdowns in intergenerational communication in the arts scene in Morocco. The residency will also give Mouhawalat members the time and space to discuss the collective needs for their project during the discussions and group meetings and establish a network with artists in Marseille.
Noura Al Khasaweneh, Jordan / artist and curator
Destination: Jordan → Mexico
Itinerary: Noura will participate in a workshop and art residency organized by the Pocoapoco arts and culture organization in Oaxaca, Mexico. The workshop focuses on ethnobotany and medical practices that affect women’s health. In her research work, Noura will revisit traditional rituals and the objects associated with them with an eye to changing modes of practice in medicine. She will also research another topic: clay pot irrigation, an ancient Egyptian water-saving technique that keeps the soil moist in arid environments. Noura’s project will culminate in the creation of a living sculpture consisting of a healing garden of native medicinal plants grown using an irrigation system that nourishes the soil. She will develop this work in collaboration with other artists and craftspeople from Oaxaca.
School of Dramatic Art, Syria / an academic collective for training actors and theater directors
Destination: Syria → Lebanon
Itinerary: Members of the School of Dramatic Art will travel to Lebanon to present The University of Laughs at Sunflower Theater and its director, Samir Othman Albach will present a master class to a group of acting students in Lebanon. Not only will this participation generate wider publicity for the school and its activities through the presentation of its works to new audiences, it will also enable it to test how effective they can be in another Arab country. The School of Dramatic Art, which was founded in 2009 by a group of theater professors in Damascus, aims to train theater professionals such as actors and directors, help fulfill young people’s academic aspirations in this field, supplement and support the serious Syrian and Arab theater, and strengthen theater culture in society.
Ziyad Youssef, Palestine / artistic producer
Destination: Palestine → Italy
Itinerary: Ziyad will travel to Florence to take part in an arts residency and art restoration and preservation training course at the Accademia Riaci. The residency and course will contribute to the development of Ziyad’s personal and professional skills and broaden his knowledge of the tools and materials used in the preservation of cultural and artistic heritage. The experience will help him complete his academic studies and also develop educational materials in this field which is an important resource for cultural and academic development in the Arab region and in Palestine in particular.
Jury:
Mohamed El Ghawy, Egypt / Founder and Artistic Director of the AFCA Arts Center and the Hakawy International Arts Festival for Children in Cairo.
Sakina Gharib, Morocco / museologist and cultural and artistic management expert.
Serene Huleileh, Palestine-Jordan / researcher, translator, cultural activist, founding member of the Arab Educational Forum and Al Balad Theater, and a member of the general assembly of El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe.
The Wijhat program aims to promote the arts and culture from the Arab region, both regionally and internationally, by supporting the regional or international travels of artists and cultural actors from this region so as to facilitate their participation in cultural events and activities that enable them to present their work to diverse audiences in wider regional and/or international contexts, to exchange knowledge and expertise with peers, to build their professional capacities or to develop an artistic project.
