The Cairo Lab formed part of Between Death & Birth, the December moment in DOTE’s year of listening.
Participating Artists:
Sara Fakhry Ismail, Halim Ramses, Amara, Iman Mahdy, Rama Tajuddean, Asia Hussein, Sara Salah, Salma Al Gamal, Nourhan Maayouf, Hend Elbalouty, Noha Khattab
This lab took place in December 2022 in Cairo. I started thinking around types of embodiment and somatic practices that can help us tap into themes of death, birth and rebirth, and weaving those practices with story-telling. My collaborator Halim Ramses (www.instagram.com/reimaginingegyptology) and I decided to use ancient prayers and spells from The Book of the Dead as a fictional container through which we can think about our relationship with death, birth & rebirth. We used texts and concepts from The Book of the Dead (in the Arabic version, Exiting Towards Daylight) as a place to start.
Merging our practices together as a form of collaboration, Halim and I curated and facilitated an array of practices, starting with the body, paying attention to the tangibility of emotion and sensation. We viewed the body as a space that holds experiences of birth, death, rebirth and echoes of grief. We started most sessions with somatic movement practice led by myself, Sara Fakhry Ismail, in order to tune in, listen to ourselves. We used writing prompts, deep listening circles and encouraged sharing and pooling of knowledge and spiritual practices from artists who participated in the lab.
Session 1: Rebirth
In the first session, we began the session with a deep listening circle in which we all shared our relationships to death, birth and rebirth. We shared experiences of which we sense embodied traces of death, birth and rebirth with one another. For many of us, the subject of rebirth really resonated, and we shared forms of rebirth we experienced which are sudden, but also forms in which rebirth is had been a process of continued transformation.
I, Sara Fakhry Ismail, led our participants through a body scan, followed by Corporeal Mapping, a praxis which I developed that intertwines somatics, body mapping, drawing and text to express and reveal memory and narrative through sensation and emotion.
Session 2: Spells as Code
A spell is often a code, in which we communicate exactly what is needed to be known, but may also include information which is necessary but cannot be revealed outright, such as symbols, or illegible and redacted text.
In the second session, we started the session by writing a letter to our past selves. The exercise was in two parts, in the first part, the letter is a stream of consciousness that can also weave a narrative or story about the person the letter is written to. In the second part, we select parts of the letter as a smaller version. We then worked with selected spells from the book Exiting Towards Daylight and re-wrote parts of those spells, or wrote spells of our own inspired by them. We began to experiment with symbols and creating illegible and obscure text, whether obscuring through metaphor, or visually through jumbling handwriting or crossing entire words and sections. Through these exercises we thought about the way that death, birth and rebirth are embodied in us through emotions that are often banished, buried in our undercurrents, away from daily life.
Session 3: Understanding Ancient and Modern Spell Traditions
In this third session of the lab, we looked at various traditions of spells in Egypt. We looked at coptic and modern spells and discussed the use of text, drawing and material in those spells. We discussed classic spells and prayers, such as ones asking deities for wealth, health, love and protection. We questioned political implications of “dark magic”, or spells that wish harm on others, and thought about whether such a spell inflicts violence, or whether it may reveal violence already inflicted on its makers. The selection of spells was curated by Halim Ramses from his long-term research on Egyptian spiritual traditions.
Session 4: Protection
Protection is one of the main recurring themes when it comes to spells relating to death, birth and rebirth. We began this session with a somatic movement practice to explore bodily space, and space just outside of the skin. The practice focuses on the porousness of skin as a separator between self and other, inside and outside as continuations. We then moved into developmental movement practices to awaken the inner child in us, as a self who most engages vulnerability, volatility, protection and the need for it. We then discussed concepts of protection, what do we need to protect, and how this concept of protection reveals what we value. We questioned whether we may protect parts of ourselves we do not value. We then engaged in using new materials as well as materials we had created thus far to create objects that may act as protection spells.
Session 5: Manifesting
In this session, we entertained the idea of manifestation as a process of acknowledging all change; beginnings and endings; death, birth and rebirth. In this session, we discussed somatic concepts relating to action such as intention and direction. We continued creating our works of writing and making objects and spells that we had started the prior session. We had a deep listening circle, after which discussed notions of belief, and how belief moves our action in the world. We entertained notions of birth and death as it relates to parts of ourselves that we choose to create or let go of. Finally, we had a sharing circle in which we each shared texts, objects and works that we have created in relation to the aforementioned themes.
Sharing Event:
In the final sharing event, we invited Kosbarra collective into a conversation in which we shared our practices with them our practices, and where they shared with us their work on death and grief with us. Together with them, we installed parts of our process as well as textual and visual works we created throughout the lab in the event space. In the space, we also installed objects and texts sent to us by the lab in Amsterdam, and activated many of the spells that we created and that have been sent to us. We allowed for a time where those arriving can take a look at the works installed, converse, ask questions and have side conversations.
Our sharing circle was intimate, we allowed for silence and encouraged our groups as well as our audience to participate. We held a deep listening session, followed by a sharing circle in which many of us talked about our experience in the lab, the themes and how they resonate with us, and read poems and texts that we either wrote, or that have helped us in thinking about the theme. We then asked all those present to clear the space, move around and talk to one another echoing questions and themes that surfaced during the sharing circle. We then invited all present to share food prepared by Reem Jalil (www.instagram.com/jebenatime), who introduced the meal in how it relates to the themes of the lab and the event. Through the food, Jalil questions notions of sprouting, aging and preservation as modes of transformation which were conceptualized by ancient traditions.
