Egypt's Living Heritage: Community Engagement in Re-Creating the Past

'Egypt's Living Heritage: Community Engagement in Re-Creating the Past' explores and promotes the engagement of local communities with their heritage through the deployment of the arts as particularly effective in the transmission of the values and meanings that intangibly inhere in tangible artifacts, architecture and environments. It selects as its case study the area of Historic Cairo, in tandem with the Urban Regeneration project for Historic Cairo (launched by UNESCO-WHC in 2010), in order to address the interface between past and present in multi-dimensional ways. The intellectual research is motivated by questions of what of the past continues in the present and of how the living transmission of the past is effected, as will be explored through workshops bringing together UK and Egyptian scholars and arts practitioners and through the screening of documentaries pertinent to this enquiry. Building on this basis, research by practice will involve communities in the curating of their own artisanal and creative products, together with the cultural memories and legacies attendant on these, through both oral history and specialist ateliers. Conventional approaches will be combined with more experimental methods as the working communities of Historic Cairo and contemporary visual artists, musicians and writers from Egypt and the UK will be brought together in order to create a forum for the sharing of skills and ideas towards, in the first instance, an exhibition, with the further aim of generating new forms of entrepreneurship leading to increased revenue opportunities. In addition, the psycho-geography of Cairo will be explored through the analysis of dreams in relation to Egyptian myths, folk tales and literature as will be disseminated through a short film. The project will serve to realize connections between the traditional and contemporary, between the popular culture of the past and the popular and youth cultures of the present, and between Egyptian cultural heritage and international recipients, with outputs including publications and an insiders' heritage map. In the process of this range of activities, new cultural, social and intellectual networks will be formed towards the establishment of a new research centre and the ongoing preservation of heritage through community engagement.

It will be of benefit to:
a) the communities engaged with in Historic Cairo. They will be involved in curating their own contributions to cultural heritage through oral history projects and through invited contributions to the planned exhibition. In being introduced to contemporary artists in different fields (visual art, photography, film, music and performance), they will receive opportunities to acquire new skills and new ideas in re-creating the past and in appealing to audiences. This will be of social benefit, mitigating against social alienation, and of economic benefit as the collaborative projects and knowledge transfer will lead to increased revenue opportunities.
b) policy-makers in the field of heritage preservation. The research by practice aims to bring community participants together with contemporary artists in an unprecedented way. Traditional practices and the contemporary arts tend to operate in distinct spheres and this venture will serve to establish new ways in which the preservation of heritage may be conducted, particularly with respect to intangible heritage. Community engagement will be a means of extending the responsibility of preserving heritage.
c) Egyptian citizens and tourists, both local and international. Through the exhibition and insiders' heritage map, awareness of both intangible and tangible heritage will be promoted. This will in turn promote wider citizen ownership of cultural heritage as well as cultural tourism amongst those interested in not only Ancient Egypt but contemporary Egypt, in particular on the part of young, adventurous tourists.
d) Egyptian musicians and artists. There will be opportunities for international curators and audiences to gain greater awareness of modern and contemporary arts in Egypt which will help promote these arts on an international stage. Egypt is under-represented on this stage, as regards international engagement with the MENA region, and Egyptian art and music markets could benefit economically through greater dissemination and wider publicity.
e) Curators of Egyptian arts and crafts, both in Egypt and the UK, especially in that dialogue will be created between curators and communities around the socio-cultural values and meanings inherent in specific arts and crafts. In the UK, contact will be made with the British Museum regarding its new initiative on curating modern Egypt.
f) The education sector. Materials will be produced that could be used on courses in the field of cultural heritage where a greater understanding of intangible heritage in terms of 'the living past' could be used to inform many other projects.
g) Psychotherapists interested in developing culturally grounded forms of psycho-affective analysis.