Fall 2019, AlexandriaLab
Skills Lab
Course details
- Cycle
- Fall 2019, Alexandria
- Taught in
- English
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About the course
The skills lab run in parallel to the core curriculum. it starts from the organic towards the theoretical. dividing The lab into two parts, the practical and theoretical. Where students will be discussing theories stemming from practices and activities, in order to further reflect and understand the experimental part.
Although we’re not researchers or artists, together we will engage with our surroundings in order to discover different ways of seeing and surviving, through a little bit of imagination and art. Documenting our findings along the way using visual art, sound mixing and storytelling.
An exhibition of our harvest is expected at the end of the semester. However, practices offered in this year’s skills lab is mainly “process-based” focused on social interaction and is aimed to provoke our different skills, and ways of expressing.
Mapping our journey through the streets of Alexandria, Our theme will be focused on seeking to understand how urban topology and aesthetic affects the city’s sense of identity, how it shapes and redefines our own identities, relationships and future.
Who teaches it
Mariam Soliman is a student of oriental languages at the faculty of arts Alexandria university, and a CILAS graduate. She's a translator, as well as writing illustrated stories for children. however, her preferred method of communication is visualized rather than verbalized. She is a firm believer in the capability of telling compelling stories through photographs, that is what she tries to portray through her passion for photography and through her film-making attempts. At CILAS Alex, She will serve as a co-facilitator for the Skills Lab.
Manar Imam is a CILAS Alex graduate from Aswan, Egypt. She is completing her degree in media management at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport. She is interested in theater and storytelling, specially documenting stories related to ethnicity and culture, and to create a link between them. At CILAS Alex, She will serve as a co-facilitator for the Skills Lab.
Hussein El-Hajj is a cultural activist and researcher in the field of radical pedagogy and alternative higher education. From 2015 to 2017 he worked as a librarian at the Cairo Contemporary Image Collective. He is currently the coordinator of the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Alexandria (CILAS Alex) where he also teaches translation of the humanities and social sciences. He has published an Arabic-language poetry collection, Tuyuf / Spectres (2015). His published translations include A User's Guide to Demanding the Impossible by Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Yadawia for handmade books, 2018) and two online anthologies (2018) on alternative higher education in association with CILAS: On the Emergence of Pigeon Towers and a collection of collaborative student translations, Education as Translation. At CILAS Alex, he will serve as the teaching fellow for the Skills Lab's theoretical accompaniment.
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