Issue No. 591
Culture
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20 - 26 June 2002 Issue No. 591 Culture |
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Oh to be a plumber
Kristina Nelson has lived in the Arab World since 1983, spending time in Gaza, Tunisia and Sudan as well as Egypt. She is a writer, musician and scholar, author of the recently republished and widely acclaimed The Art of Reciting the Qur'an. For two years (1998-2000) she coached voice with El-Warsha Theatre and in Mohamed Abdel-Hadi's actor training studio. She is a freelance arts consultant but has worked within the framework of the Ford Foundation and the Arab Arts Project, a regional arts organisation she founded with members of El-Warsha. Nelson has also taught at the University of Texas, Austin and the University of California, Berkeley.
For a long time I've been e-mailing and making phone calls, writing proposals, reports, project overviews, concept papers. And making phone calls. Since letting go of the Arab Arts Project, which I participated in founding, on leaving the Ford Foundation in 1997, I seem to have been doing nothing else. Not that I was doing anything wildly different then: I was the only full-time employee; I was responsible for office administration and project upkeep. The idea, which continues to be a priority of mine, was to make it easier for artists to work in the Arab world and to encourage alternatives. In other words I am a freelance arts consultant: fund raising, networking, conceptualisation. And I love what I'm doing. Ya salam! It really is enjoyable work, from a certain perspective. And I do love to write. But I hate fund-raising because I hate wheeling and dealing. Which sometimes makes me wonder why it is that I spend my life doing what I'm doing. Living in the Arab world has taught me to enjoy joking and playing around with things, language, especially, whereas I tend to take everything too seriously. But if my life were to start over, I think I would go for the career of a carpenter or a plumber -- someone who works with their hands, doing something immediately, physically rewarding -- or at least a librarian in some small obscure town. Theoretically I am still part of the Arab Arts Project in the sense that I'm doing pretty much what I was doing there. One of my interests in setting up the AAP was to establish an organisation that demonstrated alternative ways of working. Not hierarchy. A place that would stress transparency, accountability, take risks and all of that sort of thing. After two years it was time to move on. I very much like the idea that institutions have a shelf life, that they are not meant to go on forever. And at this point I don't see the point of a central office, I think the Arab Arts Project has achieved its objectives. There is already a big difference in the field, a lot more independent arts organisations, cross-border work, people working along similar lines. I no longer see the point of a project as such, which I think is evidence of its success.
As arts consultant I'm involved in a lot of things at the same time. My problem is that there are too many things I'm interested in: playing music, photography, voice coaching as well as grant making. I'm executive coproducer of "An Arab Midsummer Night's Dream", a production by the Swedish director Eva Bergman.
I'm also on the board of a wonderful organisation called SUDIA (Sudan Development Initiative Abroad), it has an office here. It has just expanded and has an office now in Sudan. It aims to work with displaced and marginalised people in the Horn of Africa. And it's an example of something I've always been deeply interested in: to bring imagination and art into development, to use the creative process as a model for development and for life. One thing SUDIA did, for example, was to organise a stamp exhibition in Khartoum. An international event that created a neutral ground for people of different, even opposite persuasions to meet and to work together. On the basis of their interest in stamps. Without the exhibition they might never have talked to each other.
I'm still doing a lot connected with Sudan, I'm editing the material for the Web site of KWOTO, which is an arts group that I helped start when I was in Sudan. And I've just met with Ahmed El-Bakri, an actor who now works with the Sudan Centre for Culture and Information, an organisation that brings together members of the various southern tribes in exile to promote a culture of peace rather than violence.
I'm also part of a Bibliotheca Alexandrina project called "Imagining the Book". It involves an exhibit, not of books or book illustrations but of works of art inspired by the idea of the book. The exhibit will be the conclusion of a workshop to be held in September, at the time of the Bibliotheca's opening and in the context of Alexandria being the UNESCO's book capital in 2002. There will also be a two-day colloquium on issues surrounding the idea. It's got a tremendous response from artists all over the world, people from Indonesia, Japan, Mexico as well as Europe and the Arab world. The idea of having an exhibit was Mohamed Abul- Naga's; he is an artist who works with paper. It inspires me because it brings together books as a source of knowledge with other sources of knowledge, like visual media and, of course, imagination. In order to succeed today you have to be literate, while other sources of knowledge are undermined. The colloquium is important at a time when people are jumping straight from illiteracy to the Internet, I think. It will underline questions like who owns knowledge, what is a book today, the value of the book as a source of knowledge. My job, as always, is to come up with a framework for the event. And to write e-mails...
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