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

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'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.