The atmosphere this year at the Aswan International Sculptures Symposium (AISS) continues to be overshadowed by a despondency bordering on gloom. Now in its 18th year, AISS is – like its host city, Aswan -- quieter than usual, reflecting the fact that both are suffering financially. Most Aswan residents work in or depend directly or indirectly on tourism, which has been in recession since the 2011 revolution. The same fate befell AISS as lack of funds forced the board to cut the symposium budget to two thirds of the previous round's. With the number of artists reduced and every artist offered a smaller block of granite, the situation is not as vibrant as it might be. Calm and silence overwhelm the area where artists carved their sculptures, by now an empty and dark plot of land. Artists have already completed their sculptures and left the field after transporting their works to the open-air museum located at Shalalate where art works produced over the past 18 years are exhibited. In fact the museum is set in breathtaking scenery, illustrating the magical marriage of desert and Nile, with the green of the valley standing out like emerald amid the dusty plains of the desert – now ornamented with 147granite sculptures of different colours, sizes and shapes. This year the open-air gallery saw a great development nonetheless. Every sculpture exhibited was perfectly lit to bring out its beauty, while parts of the rocky backdrop were bathed in a violet light forming delicate shadows on the stones. A gallery constructed of wood and glass showcased the smaller pieces, while other small pieces were placed in the passageway leading to a theatre with a granite stage featuring cultural performances. The larger pieces were scattered freely on the desert floor to act and react with the wild nature of the surrounding mountains, with the infrastructure – lighting, sewerage and drainage systems – now complete. Roads and pathways were paved and stony steps were set to facilitate the visitors' tour. At the entrance, a multi-purpose building is now under construction with toilets, a cafeteria and a bookstore. It also includes an exhibition gallery displaying sketches by the artists before they started on their carvings; all the previous AISS catalogues; photographs of artists working and scenes of the open air museum that show how the pieces interact with the surrounding nature. “Only a few more steps and the open-air gallery will be ready to welcome visitors,” Mohamed Abu Seada, the head of the Cultural Development Fund (CDF), told the Al-Ahram Weekly, promising that the museum will open in summer. He pointed out that the museum development project, which started four years ago and is led by artist and architect Akram El-Magdoub, is unlike any other ongoing project at present: “The more you work on it, the more you develop it and find new areas to spotlight and ways to spotlight them.” He went on to explain that, after the facilities were provided, the entrance zone appeared to be plain and empty in a way that did not introduce “such a great place” appropriately. “First,” Abu Saeda continued, “we tried to use some existing piece to decorate the entrance, but it did not fit...” And so the AISS board dedicated this year's round to adorning the museum's entrance with special sculptures – the last step on the way to its official opening. The AISS board invited nine Egyptian and foreign sculptors who had previously participated in the symposium to experience the distinguished atmosphere of the museum with a view to carving suitable sculptures to beautify the entrance. After 50 days of being face to face with granite, the courtyard outside the museum's entrance is now filled with red, black, grey and rose granite sculptures. Here is a forest of swaying trees, the martyr with a golden crown, the museum's guardian and the magic wand with a star at the top like the one in the legend of Cinderella. There is another collection depicting in abstract form the Udjat eye of Horus, the resurrection of the monotheistic ancient Egyptian King Akhnaten, the interaction of sunlight with sand reflected on rosy granite and the movement of stones with each others. “Life is the only thing missing in the open-air museum,” Japanese artist Haruko Yamashita told the Weekly while admiring the work. She explained that when she roamed around the museum she decided to carve something that could break the silence between the vivid nature of the museum and the sculptures on display. She selected five red granite blocks and carved them in an abstract style to depicting swaying trees. To express the movement of the trees, she carved waves just before the top of each block. Some are bent to the left, others to the right; all are decorated with squares and circles. “Although this is the fourth time I've participated in AISS, this year means a lot to me,” Yamashita said: despite the warnings of her government and friends not to travel to Egypt, she insisted on coming to share in the great event: “With my forest of trees I directly contributed to the final touches of this great museum which was a dream come true.” The museum is an open art gallery of distinguished sculptors who, reviving the ancient Egyptian art of moulding granite, express different schools and styles in taming granite. In addition top the forest of trees, Yamashita produced a small grey granite piece; every hour, she commented on this work, the sunlight has a new effect on every sculpture on show, which gives it a different perspective. Believing in the purity of nature, that the artist must not interfere too much with the granite block in order not to disturb its primitive design and natural beauty, French artist François Weil and Hungarian artist Rath Geber Atila carved very simple sculptures. Weil used his usual carving technique mixing installation with sculpture and metal. He carved two huge blocks; the bigger one is almost a triangle while the smaller one is a semicircle fixed on top of the triangular one with a hidden piece of metal that enables it to move by air power. “When AISS invited me to share in the decoration of the museum I didn't hesitate,” Weil said, adding that the museum is a unique one which must be perfectly arranged in order to preserve both its nature and sculptures. For his part Atila carved his sculpture to be part of the original mountain of the museum. He chose a red granite rock on top of a hill at the entrance and carved it in a way to look like a huge, rough wedding ring. “This sculpture will attract the attention of the museum's visitors to the natural beauty of the original blocks in the mountain,” Atila pointed out. He believes people will not realise that his piece is a manmade sculpture, thinking instead that it is part of the mountain -- his goal from the beginning. He claims that whoever sits or stands inside this huge ring will feel more relaxed and happy. Politics cast a shadow over the art works of artists like Sherif Abdel Badea, Vivian El-Batanoni and Mohamed Sabri, on the other hand. Badea carved a seven-metre-long statue depicting a man in abstract with the silhouette of a prostrate man covered in gold paper with a hole in the middle of his chest on top – the influence of the revolution, he told the Weekly. As a revolutionary himself, Badea feels obliged commemorate those youngsters who lost their lives in the struggle to liberate their country. “This is the minimum that I could do for them,” he said, adding that he used red and black granite in carving his piece to symbolise the dripping blood and the death of the martyrs. He carved the crown in the shape of a sleeping man with a hole in his chest to symbolise the deceased and the bullet: “This hole would make a sound if the air passed reflecting the sound of pain.” He covered the crown with gold paper in order to highlight how valuable those people's lives were, like gold. The works of El-Batanoni and Sabry try to find ways out of the Pandora's box of the current political crisis. El-Batanoni carved a red magic wand with a star at the top like the one of the good witch in Cinderella legend; the idea is that this wand will alter reality and bring about a better future. “I love stars – they were always a main theme in my sculptures,” El-Batanoni said. This time she modified her use of the star motif somewhat, with the object emerging out of the earth and moving quickly towards the horizon and beyond, into space, to realise the dreams of those who live on earth. El-Batanoni told the Weekly that, over the 50 days of AISS, her relationship with her sculpture was always changing. Sometimes she hated her piece and started treating it harshly, at other time she felt more comfortable with it, pampering it with strikes of the hammer. In the end, she feels, it came out very beautiful. Sabry too used a red granite block depicting in abstract the resurrection of the monotheistic ancient Egyptian King Akhenaten. Sabry calls on Akhenaten's soul to come back and free the nation from rigid thought and resurrect the art which reached its zenith during his reign. In his work Sabry was also influenced by ancient Egyptian history and the work depicts Akhenaten in abstract looking to the sun as the source of happiness. French artist Patric Belin, always fond of ancient Egyptian civilisation, worked very little on his piece. He kept his black granite block almost untouched, installing it in a huge sand pit to make it look as if it were emerging out of the ground. He decorated the top with gold paper that would glitter in the sun. “I insisted on doing my piece like this in order to attract the museum's visitors to walk along the passage to discover what is glittering inside the pit,” Belin said. In time, he added, the pit may be covered in sand and the whole sculpture buried until it can be rediscovered by explorers. Visitors can see the piece as an unfinished open-air museum piece, as some volcanic lava or an archaeological excavation. “I keep everything to the imagination of the viewers,” Belin concluded. Egyptian artists Hani Faisal and Walid Fathi carved two pieces that directly serve the theme of the AISS this year. Faisal carved a six metre long red granite statue depicting in abstract a guardian of the museum holding a black granite shield decorated with gray granite pieces. “This guardian will stand at the entrance of the museum not only to guard it but to welcome visitors as well,” Faisal said. Fathi carved a gray granite eye of Aswan which is similar to the ancient Egyptian amulet named the eye of Horus and used to protect the wearer from the evil eye, to protect the open-air museum. “Holding the 18th round of AISS was really a great challenge, but it proved a successful as an attempt to win a battle against the security fears and the lack of a budget from the ministry,” AISS commissar Adam Henein told the Weekly. At the closing ceremony, Henein said that in the last 18 years AISS had succeeded in reviving “Egypt the sculptor, and the art of sculpting and architecture which are Egypt's identity.” The AISS collection reached 260 sculptures, 147 of them are on display at the open-air museum, 27 decorating different squares and streets in Aswan, with the remaining 24 distributed among different governorates in Egypt. These pieces were carved by 50 Egyptian and 132 foreign artists from 44 countries. Henein called on national communities and Egyptian artists to adopt the idea of transforming AISS into a state authority, as they do in Great Britain. He said he first visualised the idea of a symposium while on a tour of Europe; he proposed the idea when he saw former minister of culture Farouk Hosni, who was then Egypt's cultural attachee in Paris. Henein told the Weekly that Hosni was enthusiastic about it and promised to implement it if one day he became a minister. Several years later, when he was minister of culture, Hosni kept his promise; the first round of AISS was launched in his presence in January 1996.
