The Wasla Workshop was an opportunity for nineteen international contemporary artists to live and work together for two weeks. About half of the artists came from Egypt, the remainder from the region and farther a field. The selected artists were a mixture of experienced and emerging practitioners, a number of whom work across fields such as sound, theatre and architecture. The processes of art-making and open engagement, the possibilities of experimentation, of collaboration and interaction with other artists and the environment were important themes.

The workshop’s organic structure allowed the sharing of routes of discovery. For a fortnight, the artists sifted through a new environment and translated their surroundings into familiar terrain. This re-articulation defined the cyclical process of internalising and externalising the context, and the eventual production. The experience was of an investigative nature, hinting at possibilities without the constraints of measurable outcomes. The workshop catalogue and website are an extension of the exploration begun at the workshop. Its contents indicate a direction begun at Wasla, which incorporates its circumstances and influences: idyllic natural surroundings; proximity to an ongoing war; a highly charged historical, political and social context; limited resources, and the common, if idiosyncratic, experience of unfamiliarity.

1 Daniel Buren, “The Function of the Studio,” in Annette Michelson et al. (eds.), October: The First Decade (Cambridge, MA, 1987), p.207.

2 Fabrice Hybert as quoted in Bart de Baere, “Extra Muros” in the catalogue of the exhibition, This is the Show and the Show is Many Things at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent, Belgium (1994). This exhibition was one of the earliest attempts to present process within a museum context.