M55

The presence of the Greek, French and Italian element in the city is a constant reference and an active link to the cosmopolitan character of the city. Greek and French are still spoken, while there is a Greek and an Italian school. We plan to develop a long term project, aiming to explore what the presence of Greeks, French and Italians left as a legacy to the city. We will start with Greeks as there is still an active community in Alexandria. Our team is composed of people from the art, academic and educational world, from different countries. This offers an intercultural and interdisciplinary approach to our project.

Three objectives - Three phases
1/ The objective of the project is to capture the collective memory of Greek presence in Alexandria through on site research (based on interviews,archives, etc).
2/ Based on the material collected during the first phase, we would like to interact with the contemporary alexandrian society through a series of artistic and research workshops (creative writing, mapping/cartography and puppet theater)
3/ Presentation of the project outcome: interdisciplinary exhibition of maps,photographs, videos and a puppet theater performance.

RESEARCH
Our starting point will be the creation of an audiovisual archive of collective memory and human geography of Greeks and Egyptians who lived during the heyday of the Greek community.

• - oral history of the members of Greek community that live or used to live in Alexandria. This will constitute an archive of interviews.
• - cartography of the places/buildings that mark Greek presence in the city. The interviews of the Greeks will give us directions and help define the areas to map. Places on the map will reflect the different social interconnections of Greeks (cafes, shops, churches, clubs etc…).
• - photographic capture of these places in the city nowadays
• - research in the archives of the Greek Community, Greek newspapers and private archives.

Based on the information, stories and pictures collected, we will propose workshops for young Greek and Egyptian Alexandrians.
The cartography/mapping workshops will explore the city of Alexandria through the memory of the city. The creative writing workshops will focus on the relationship of young people with the city they live in and their dreams for it.

• - Cartography/Mapping and creative writing workshops for adolescent pupils of the Greek high school of Alexandria and students of Greek language of the Foundation for Hellenic Culture
• - Cartography/Mapping and creative writing workshops for students in architecture and anthropology in Alexandria.

We would like to create an intercultural framework for working together on the idea of the city of Alexandria allowing young people, to practice and acquire language skills, connect with their history through art, mapping and writing and to form a multilingual and multicultural network.
The duration of the workshops will be 3 weeks with 2 meetings per week for each workshop.

In particular, the project proposes three autonomous, but interlinked workshops under the following themes:

• - Cartography/Mapping. The mapping workshops will explore the signs of Greek presence in the city of Alexandria.
• - Creative writing workshops will focus on the relationship of young people with the city they live in and their dreams for it.

• - Puppeteers from Greece and Egypt will work on the texts and images of the city and will produce a joint representation. This will give life to the oral histories of collective memory. Puppet theatre, being an art of materialization, will be based on the "material" of Alexandria, i.e. the city itself. The collaboration-exchange between Greek and Egyptian puppeteers intends to bring the city of Alexandria to the size of a puppet theatre stage on the shoulders of the puppeteers (see picture 6).

The story-script of the puppet theatre intertwines and plays with the actual history seen from different narratives.

The outcome of the workshops will be a presentation in both Greece and Egypt and a combined promotion of the resulting material in the form of an exhibition. There will also be a multilingual publication including the stories collected, the maps and the pictures.
Puppet Theater
Two cities will meet on stage with a desire to connect the puppetry tradition of the two countries, the common history of the two countries and the material-conceptual aspect of Alexandria then and now, in a presentation- performance titled: "Alexandria - A city’s dream"