Archives of a temporary Migration; Egyptians in the Gulf أرشيفات الهجرة المؤقتة ؛ المصريون في الخليج

Archives of a temporary Migration; Egyptians in the Gulf 

@anthropology_bel3araby and Medrar Studio are jointly organising and launching the call for our upcoming workshop: Archives of a temporary Migration; Egyptians in the Gulf.

This collaborative workshop aims to creatively express anthropological debates about the experience of Egyptian migration to the Gulf through video montage and experimentation.

Although millions of Egyptians migrated to the Gulf since the 1970s, the experience is underrepresented in pop culture and scholarly literature, despite how much it impacted family dynamics, worldviews, feeling of temporariness, social class, aspirations, and much more that we will explore together. In this workshop we will not only look at the bigger contexts of Gulf migration (political, social, and economic), but more deeply into the personal, our sense of belongings, sense of alienation, relationship to death and life, and our visual/sensory memories and how all of this could help us understand the bigger social structures.

As we discuss the different themes, we will be playing with pop culture archives (films and musalsalat) and our own footage; pictures and home videos. During this workshop, we will  experiment with moving images and edit both archives (the public and the personal), as an attempt to challenge and question the different representations and experiences.

We will also have Mohamed Shalaby, Hady Zaccak, and Mohamed Allam as guest speakers, who will help us work with personal and film/muslaslat archives. 

The workshop is 8 sessions (1month) + access to Medrar Studio for post production (editing/colouring).

Workshop Fee: 1500 EGP paid in 1 or 2 instalments

To apply please fill up this application form before the 18th of July:

https://forms.gle/XSvnFJZs74pubpes9

About the Guests

Mohamed Shalaby is a documentary filmmaker and journalist with enthusiasm in using conventions of dramatic structure to shape factual narratives and tell human driven stories. He is a graduate of the National Film and Televsion School with an MA in Directing Documentary with Most Promising Student award. Award winner and 5× award nominated Documentary Filmmaker. Currently working with the BBC Arabic Documentary unit.

Hady Zaccak is a Lebanese award-winning documentary maker and a professor at IESAV film school. He recently edited and curated “In this Place: Reels of Beirut” exhibition where he used films that featured Beirut’s port, downtown, hotel and cabareh as archive material – where he then edited them to tell a story. We will chat with him about the process of looking at films as an archive and his editing process of creating narratives and storylines from found film footage.

Mohamed Allam is a visual artist who lives and works in Cairo using different mediums such as video, performance and sound. He is interested in different forms of performativity, as he playfully creates narratives and intervenes with existing ones. His work also explores relationships between humans and objects, and the physical environment and context that brings them both together. He has participated as an artist in numerous events since 2003. Allam is also concerned with art management and has participated in organising several art events in Cairo. He is a co-founder of the Cairo-based artist initiative ” Medrar for Contemporary Art ” which aims at the promotion of contemporary artistic practices of young artists in Egypt. Allam will share with us some of his insights from working on his long term project ”Personal Recordings from Egypt”. 

About the instructor – Farah Hallaba
Farah obtained her MA in Social Anthropology and Visual Ethnography from University of Kent. She started @anthropology_bel3araby انثروبولوجي بالعربي in 2019, aiming to publicize anthropology in an accessible way and in Arabic. She has been doing short engaging online videos and collaborative workshops since then; mainly Visual Anthropology workshops and Collaborative Anthropology workshops about social class and migration. Currently Farah is a resident fellow at CILAS teaching Ethnographic Studies. She also shares a creative space in downtown Cairo, where she collaborates with artists to offer spaces for creative discussion-based knowledge production.