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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Special Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Hard rock
By Youssef Rakha
Photos: Randa ShaathNothing could sum up the spirit of this year's symposium better than set designer Salah Mar'i's perceptive disclaimer: "Whether or not it is worthwhile depends on your viewpoint." Before you judge the symposium, in other words, think about what it implies.
Granite sculpture, once a cornerstone of Egyptian civilisation, may now seem like a Sisyphean, if not an altogether redundant, endeavour. But the attempt to find a place for it in contemporary Egyptian culture has generated so much vitality in the last four years that its force field extends far beyond the foyer of the Basma Hotel, opposite the Nubian Museum, where sculptors from five continents have pitted themselves against the resilience of this hardest of rocks for the last two months.
Quietly and unobtrusively the symposium has wriggled its way onto French television channels and into UNESCO offices, making an impact not only in the salons and art galleries of Cairo, but also on the lives of the simple people who populate the villages of Aswan. Certainly, commissar Adam Henein's acknowledgement of support from such figures as Minister Farouk Hosni and Governor Salah Misbah appears well founded. But what firmly establishes the event's credentials is the participating sculptors near unanimous verdict as to its success.
An excellent symposium, they might have sung in unison, though none of them was entirely free of -- admittedly minor -- doubts. The ancient azmil (chisel) had, it seems, duly honoured the hands of sculptors from all over the world. Yet the question that now arises is not whether the symposium will continue, but in what ways.
HEARTS OF STONE: The "osmosis between meditation and memory, reality and atmosphere", which art critic Luigi Lambertini attributed to Adam Henein's work was evident, on a much larger scale, throughout the sculpture symposium. Sculptors combined the vitality of a major cultural event, held in the heart of a grand town, with the perfect serenity inspired by the austere beauty of the rocks. Whether at the open-air museum, that long-abandoned pagan temple where their statues will forever stand, or outside the hotel, where they struggled day and night to mould the granite into enduring creations of their own, they were active, insistent and inspired -- the perfect embodiment of a life devoted to stone.
photos: Randa Shaath
Since the first, experimental round in 1996, the symposium has become more ambitious, envisaging goals which would initially have appeared unrealistic. And in the process Henein has intuitively reformulated his guidelines, reorienting the direction of the symposium on the basis of concrete experience rather than hypothetical theory.
Re-establish the practice of stone sculpture in Egypt and contribute to supporting it worldwide; offer sculptors the opportunity to produce large works in granite; educate young Egyptian artists in an open and inspiring environment; turn Aswan into an international arts centre -- these are only a few of the slogans reiterated, mantra-like, on the terrace of the Basma Hotel. But they are not just slogans. This year the number of participating sculptors has risen to 15, allowing for a degree of multicultural interaction capable of the broadening of perspectives written into Henein's curatorial policy. The resulting ongoing "non-verbal dialogue" was suitably rich, allowing sculptors as different as the 51-year-old Chinese Gue De Mao and the 36-year-old Armenian Egyptian Vahan Telbian to make contact, even though they had no language in common. "No need for conversation," Telbian insisted. "All that we had to do was look at each other's work."
For Telbian it was even better that way. But others, like Indian sculptor Balbir Singh Katt, dean of Visual Arts at Banaras University, found fault with the lack of formal discussions. "It is nonetheless difficult to start a discussion artificially," responded French sculptor Marcel Petit, another senior participant. "Since everybody was working on large stones, after the first two weeks we started working and having our meals at different times, so there wasn't much opportunity for discussion. But this is inevitable in a symposium of large works."
Of the fact that multicultural interaction in "the ancient studio" of Aswan was beneficial everybody was aware, but different people articulated their responses differently. Katt saw the presence of Asian, African and Latin American sculptors as a movement away from Eurocentrism, and a chance for developing countries to benefit not only from developed countries but from each other. To him the symposium was a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey from East (India) to West (Egypt), symbolised by the flight of the Sun Bird, the latest in a series of symmetrical spheroids he has been working on for the past two decades and the first to be executed in granite. In addition to the beauty of the landscape and the kindness of the people, points on which nobody disagreed, it was "the omnipresence of stone, the nearness of the granite", that he found inspiring.
Another artist who valued his visits to the quarries was the Japanese Mansanori Sugisaki. He too found the multicultural atmosphere a good chance of making contact with people he would not otherwise have met. But working in Aswan presented him with an unforeseen problem: the weather was too dry. "And, of course... language problems," he added, though even Sugisaki was thoroughly Egyptianised. His Upper Egyptian assistants had christened him Dessouqi, a sobriquet to which he did not object since it made everyday communication smoother.
Europeans found the multinational milieu equally stimulating. For French sculptor Jean-Paul Philippe (who, along with the Egyptian Sobhi Girgis, participated as a guest of honour, and will be continuing his work on a large-scale statue to be placed in a public square in Cairo for two extra months), it was interesting to confront the many (oppositional) viewpoints that must inevitably arise given such a hotchpotch of backgrounds. "This round was very interesting," he said, "because of its diversity of perspectives." And Aswan did have a positive effect on his work which, he explained, he had sought out long before he got involved with the symposium. "It makes everything simpler and more serene," he remarked.
Petit, too, commended the curating, likening the overall mixture of people to a broth, a nutritious meal in which various ingredients combined to produce a distinctive, previously undiscovered flavour. To him the symposium had turned Aswan into a melting pot in which people from all over the world rediscovered sculpture as an essential vocational link. The Ancient Egyptian concern with life after death, on the other hand, drove him back towards his Christian upbringing, in which the notion of an afterlife played an essential role, and in this sense his presence in Aswan directly influenced his work by driving him away from abstraction, his usual forte, and towards a more direct intimation of the figure of Death.
What it has done for young Egyptian sculptors, though, is probably the symposium's most abiding achievement. During the second round 30 of them worked in sandstone alongside the official participants, while in the third round the most promising five were given their first opportunity to work in granite, on the fringe of the symposium. Three of these five survived to the fourth round, becoming official participants themselves. "Otherwise it wouldn't have been possible to realise my vision," said 29-year-old Essam Darwish. "At college there was no way I could do anything remotely as big as this."
Telbian agreed: "I never went to college much anyway, but the difference here is obvious. The beauty of natural rock is that it has its own character, and every time you work on it, it's like starting all over again, as if you hadn't learned anything in the past." Though he ended up with cracked stone, which undermined his entire statue, Telbian remained perfectly content. "Who cares if the whole thing comes down? The main thing is this atmosphere, the state you're in while you do it, the joy of working."
And part of this joy derived from the location of his statue, an evocative conflation of curves which he agreed to place at the edge of the studio, a sandy enclosure outside the Basma Hotel from which Telbian's assistant could see his fiancee. "She's been dropping by every now and then," Telbian explains, "and now he's filled the stone with roses. Every aperture has a rose in it. Yes, a love-story is taking place simultaneously."
It may have been "the state" Telbian mentions to which Henein was referring when he spoke of the freedom inspired by "a space in which the student worked side by side with his teacher", but it is to the gradual re-emergence of a stone sculpture movement, and to the rigorous competence required by this hardest of rocks, that credit is ultimately due. "College develops one's thought," said Darwish. "But working in the symposium is part of one's career, practically speaking. It's a way of fulfilling your desire to do your own thing. Now that I've finally finished my statue, I want to stay next to it. When you've made something that big, you know, you're very reluctant to leave."
It could be argued that contributions by senior Egyptian sculptors are equally desirable, of course, but Henein is adamant that, with regard to Egyptian sculpture, the symposium should remain primarily educational, helping young people get over "the stone taboo" and exposing them to the most interesting work being done worldwide.
As Mar'i notes, nonetheless, the symposium remains dependent on other institutions -- the Cultural Development Fund, the Aswan Governorate, the Basma Hotel. Even if its fourth round testifies to its being among the most effective cultural events in the country, the Aswan Symposium will come of age only when it becomes its own institution, with a permanent address and a clearly definable administrative board. Only then will a discussion of issues like logistics, whether to extend the length of time participants spend on their work, and Henein's project of establishing a permanent residence for artists in Aswan be of any use. Meanwhile the journey continues, azmil in hand.
Roads to paradise, dubious passports
