Bridging cultures

Clockwise from top: snap shots from Farah Al Bahr; El-Qadi creating one of his silhouettes; Qadri explaining his painting technique; Salem "the alphabet artist"; people enjoying the event; visitors locked outside (photos: Nader Habib), Ilma band, Belgium, (photo courtesy of the Anna Lindh Foundation)

This year's Farah Al-Bahr Festival in Alexandria drew artists and performers from across the Mediterranean region, including traditional artists and calligraphers from Egypt, writes Nader Habib

The sound of music propels me forward. As a curtain of darkness shrouds the sea beyond, music drifts from the Qaitbay Fort, promising a night of fun and fanfare. Chosen as the site of an event meant to promote intercultural dialogue, this bastion once built for war has now been populated by artists and artisans, families with children and foreign residents. A taste of the once cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, the Farah Al-Bahr (Sea Fun) Festival is a celebration of diversity and neighbourliness around the Mediterranean organised by the Anna Lindh Foundation (ALF).

At the fort gates, crowds of young people await admission as they pass through various security checks. Cosmopolitanism may be the aim of the event, but access to the fort is not going to be easy. With national elections approaching and sectarian strife still fresh in the memories of this city, the famed Bride of the Mediterranean, the security forces are not taking any risks. Music and dancing may be only steps away, but at the fort gates everyone wanting entry has to go through a metal-detector.

Past the fort's ancient walls illuminated by floodlights, an expanse of mediaeval space presents itself, basking in the promised splendour of cultures in dialogue as boisterous locals mingle with polyglot foreigners. Talking together in French and German, Spanish and English, and of course in Arabic and Greek, residents of the ancient city of Alexandria have come here to celebrate and be entertained by a small army of visiting artists. Cameras flash as visitors pose for pictures, the squeals of children having fun offering a jagged counterpoint to the music. No details have been spared, even down to the candyfloss sellers who work non-stop to supply the crowds with fluffy sugar on sticks.

According to ALF spokeswoman Inji Sedky, the foundation is named after Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh, who was assassinated in 2003. Lindh was known for her unwavering support for intercultural dialogue and her tireless work for justice across the North-South divide.

"This is the third year we have held the festival," Sedky explains. "It began when the foundation opened offices in Alexandria in 2005, but then stopped for a few years. This is the third year since the festival's resumption." The festival aims to showcase the cultural diversity of the Euro-Mediterranean region, and last year's theme was cultural diversity in Egypt. Folk art troupes were brought to Alexandria from Port Said, the Sinai, Siwa and Aswan, and members of foreign communities living in Egypt, including the Palestinian community and the Greek community, staged their own shows.

This year's festival is more international in theme, Sedky says, with groups from Spain, Germany and Belgium performing at the festival, which is sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, the General Organisation for the Promotion of Tourism (GOPT), the Spanish embassy in Egypt, the Belgian Foreign Ministry and UNESCO. The festival is one of several events marking the nomination of Alexandria as Capital of Arab Tourism for 2010.

Governor of Alexandria Adel Labib says that the events at the festival are meant to cement understanding among Mediterranean nations. "The great success of the Farah Al-Bahr this year is a tribute to Alexandria and its people, reinforcing the role of Alexandria as Capital of Arab Tourism for 2010," he states. "The festival is a reminder of the city's central role in cultural cooperation among Mediterranean countries."

According to Sami Mahmoud, head of the GOPT's international tourism section, Alexandria is a popular destination for both Arab and European tourists, with the total number of foreign tourists visiting Egypt this year likely to reach 15 million. ALF Executive Director Andrew Claret adds that this year's festival has brought together thousands of young people from Egypt and abroad as part of the ALF's mandate to promote dialogue around the Mediterranean.

It is untrue that the ALF has a pro-Israeli bias, Claret says. "Here we are working with Arab people," he says. "We invite young people from Alexandria and bands from the Sinai, Alexandria, Port Said, Siwa, Cairo and Aswan. We invite people from Belgium and from Spain. This is what we do. For sure, we sometimes work with people from Israeli civil society. If those people accept the idea of dialogue and the need to recognise Palestinian rights, they are welcome to work with the ALF."

According to Claret, the ALF aims to promote culture and education and to combat xenophobia, including Islamophobia. Moreover, Egypt is an important venue for intercultural dialogue to take place. "The most important Christian community in the Arab world is in Egypt. You have 10 million Copts," he comments. Egypt may have its share of sectarian tensions, yet it is still a good example of good inter-faith relations, and Claret adds that the ALF aspires to "improve and build the capacity of Muslims, Christians and Jews to live together."

Local restaurants and the beverage industry have been invited to contribute to the festival by offering vouchers to visitors. One of the event sponsors, Sayed Muez of the beverage company Mecca, says that his company is selling its products to visitors, but is also offering samples for free. "You don't see any customers around at the moment because the bands have attracted all the crowds. But after the performance ends, a lot of people will be heading our way to get food and drinks, especially as the festival goes on till one in the morning every day," he says.

Walking from the outdoor area into the fort itself, I pass a troupe performing a Spanish dance and then a group of jugglers from a group called Clowns without Borders. Inside the fort itself, a crowd has gathered around someone trimming a piece of paper with a pair of scissors. In seconds, the paper turns into the likeness of one of the people in the crowd. According to paper-cutter Mohamed El-Qadi, he has been making such silhouettes at fairs for decades. Last year, he retired from his regular job at a print works, and today he is a full- time "silhouetter", so to speak.

An ordinary silhouette takes him less than a minute to make, and he works fast with intense concentration. "I am considered number one in the Arab world," he says, though "in fact I don't really have any rivals. I haven't been able to find an apprentice good enough to make it worth my while showing him the ropes. This kind of art is not only about technique. It is about joy and focus. The silhouette artist has to have an eye for the proportions and peculiarities of the human face."

The work is fast and irreversible, for once the paper has been cut up mistakes cannot be corrected. "I take in the features of my subject, and then I have about a minute to reproduce them in paper using just a pair of scissors," he says. He first fell in love with silhouettes when visiting the Alexandria industrial-agricultural fair in 1970.

"At that fair, there was a woman doing similar portraits with scissors. I pushed through the crowds to stand near her and watch what she was doing. Her name was Fotna Moamen. She was quite famous at the time, as the government was then interested in this form of traditional art. Gamal Abdel-Nasser himself had once seen her at a fair, and he liked her work so much that he made sure she was invited to show her work when any foreign head of state visited the country. This made her famous in Egypt and abroad, as well as a fixture at the country's fairs."

After seeing Moamen's work, El-Qadi went home and experimented with making silhouette-style portraits of his friends and family. "The outcome was good, and my family had no trouble recognising the faces I was making. This form of art came easily to me, and I thought it was easy for everyone. Then I noticed that my superiors in the art department of the company I worked for couldn't do it at all."

A year later, El-Qadi finally met Fotna Moamen in person. "As soon as she saw my work, she told me that I should abandon everything and focus on this form of art. Two days later, she was invited to a fair in Nicosia, and she asked me to fill in for her at an exhibition she was holding. When I said that I had trouble working in front of a crowd, she said that I should forget about everything and focus on what I was doing."

Within a year of that first meeting, El-Qadi was having his own exhibitions. When he works, he puts a piece of white paper on top of a piece of black paper. People prefer to have their silhouettes done in black, he explains, but it is more difficult to see the scissors if you work in a dark colour.

"Using white paper, you can see what you're doing. I cut the two papers up together, and then I dispose of the white one and give the black one to the customer." He is obsessed with faces, he says. "When I walk in the street, I look at people's faces. I notice their features and the angles of their bone structure."

The hardest faces to silhouette are ordinary ones, ones that lack angles and oddities. Children are a problem as well, as the smallest error makes them look like adults in silhouette. "You have to get the proportions right, especially around the chin," El-Qadi says.

Around a corner, a young man is writing names in Arabic script on see-through paper. When you turn the paper round, you can read the same name, but this time in English. This is a technique that he himself created and has been developing for years. A crowd has gathered around him, mesmerised by what seems to be a trick of calligraphy. According to "alphabet artist" Abdel-Wahab Salem, he's been in love with calligraphy since childhood.

He invented the technique by chance when one day he wanted to make a birthday gift for a friend. He decided to write the name of his friend in English, but the letter A appeared exactly like the letter "ein" in Arabic. "I found this interesting, so I tried to write the name once in Arabic and once in English. Then the idea hit me that I should try to write the two languages simultaneously."

He started by practising on the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, trying to see how they would look in an Arabic context. It was a crazy idea, but he found a solution, adding a third dimension to the composition. "I tried to approach the letters from a new perspective, which led me into a long period of experimentation. During that period, I wrote the Arabic word for God in 99 different ways, one for each of the 99 names." The exercise had taken a spiritual turn by that time, but it worked, and 14 years later Salem has mastered the art of writing any word in two languages simultaneously.

At the top of the fort in rooms filled with guns and ammunition, crowds sample handicrafts and souvenirs. Among the crowds is Halima El-Shami, who has brought her three grandchildren to the festival. The atmosphere reminds her of events she attended at the Wekalet Al-Ghuri in Cairo, she says.

It is good for young children to be exposed to crowds, El-Shami says. "I want to teach them how to deal with people in a crowd. Mothers have grown too protective of their kids, and they keep them indoors too long. It is good for children to run around and feel comfortable with people. But to tell you the truth, I still wish their mother was here to keep an eye on them."

Artist Ahmed Qadri, a professor at the Quality Education College in Alexandria, has organised an art workshop for children and their parents, the idea being to find out how young and old get along together in a creative situation. The answer is not always in the way one might expect. A child shows his father a painting he's just finished. The father contemplates the painting for a second, and then proceeds to tell the boy that it would have been nice if he hadn't spilled paint over both of them in the process.

"We want to work with people to help develop their artistic side," Qadri says, adding that everyone has a creative side, but some people may need a professional to guide them. "We want to help people recognise their talents and work on them."

For Qadri, creativity transcends competitiveness. "Most of the problems we suffer from, in politics, culture and religion, are the result of a competitive model gone mad. We're always thinking of competing with others. But creativity has no room for competition. Creativity is a goal, and everyone needs to participate in it. If we set our eyes on a dream, then we can put our rivalries on hold and start to better our lives."

Later, leaving the fort, I can still see crowds waiting to get inside. Ahmed El-Morshedi, who's been waiting with his friends for nearly an hour, wishes that the entry wasn't free. "Last year, the admission price was LE2, and the crowds were fewer. I know the place is crowded inside, but I don't see any reason to stop people from getting in."

It is already 10pm, but his friends are willing to wait another hour if need be. "We're going to wait as long as it takes," El-Morshedi says.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 November, 2010 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.