Fish fatale This fish gets its name from its ability to blow itself up -- to three times its size. If this doesn't hold off the enemy, like Sherif Sonbol's lens, the by now visible venomous spikes should. But the puffer only puffs as a last resort; more often it swims away, or hides, because in blowing up it puts itself in danger: the way it works is that the stomach fills with water, the creature is paralysed and, too heavy for its normal level, it sinks deeper and deeper below. A wonder though it is, it hasn't escaped the clutches of humanity; the puffer is a delicacy in Japan where only qualified chefs are allowed to prepare it, because the poison must be carefully removed. � Last week, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, Health Minister Hatem El-Gabali, Minister of Local Development Abdel-Salam El-Mahgoub, Minister of International Cooperation Fayza Abul-Naga, Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources Mahmoud Abu Zeid, and head of the General Organisation of Culture Palaces Ahmed Nawwar inaugurated the Damietta Cultural Palace. Covering an area of 2,350m but closed down for 10 years, the palace reopened after a year of renovations on a LE6.5 million budget with a 115-seat outdoor cinema and a 480-seat movie theatre as well as IT, exhibition and performance facilities. At the opening ceremony, Nawwar announced the opening of 20 more palaces in a range of governorates from Sohag to Suez. � With support from the Madrid Regional Government, the Cairo Opera House has joined hands with the Spanish Embassy to present Flamenco Republic for the first time in Egypt, a Mar�a Pagés Dance Company production. Pagés will perform at the Opera House Main Hall on 5 and 6 September and at the Sayed Darwish Theatre, Alexandria, on 8 September. She will also give a special performance at the opening of the International Youth Forum, organised by Mrs Suzanne Mubarak 's Women's International Peace Movement in Sharm El-Sheikh. Pagés is among the greatest innovators in Flamenco, and has received numerous awards among which are Spain's National Choreography and National Dance Award. She describes her vocation as a search for the truth of the dance, hence the name Flamenco Republic, an imaginary republic ruled by the laws of Flamenco in which an inner landscape of emotions unfolds in seven scenes. � India and Egypt: Influences and Interactions, an exciting new publication, was launched this week at the Opera House with Indian Ambassador A Gopinathan and, representing Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, the ministry's First Undersecretary for Foreign Relations Salah Hassab El-Nabi. The book is a joint effort of scholars from both countries trying to make sense of what binds them. � For the sixth consecutive year at the Cairo Opera House, summer children's workshops in the arts -- painting, sculpture, ceramics, mosaic, calligraphy and photography -- concluded its activities few days ago and was followed by an exhibition. No less than 300 children participated. � For the second time this year, the community development company Meshwar celebrated the success of 100 needy students they managed to help. Held at the Youth Ministry theatre in Mit Oqbah, the event featured President of the Egyptian Youth Council Hassan Saqr, the company's Market Head Egypt, Libya and the Horn of Africa Andre Porche and his wife, Public Relations Manager Adel Farghaly and Human Resources Manager Michel Ghobril ; this, in addition to a number of board members and comedian Magda Zaki. The ceremony highlighted the achievements of the students whose proactive parents helped improve their skills. Financial awards and certificates of recognition were handed out to the students. According to Meshwar Chairperson Ghada Farouk, "these students were never awarded before, they always need to be encouraged." � It's not the sound of music anymore. Opening on 9 September at the Townhouse Gallery, "the Sound of Silence" is a group exhibition curated by Amer Abbas and featuring work by five Vienna-based artists who participated in a residency programme in Cairo last week. Their encounter with an urban space distinctly different from what they were familiar with produced a strange blend of visual and aural expressions releasing a string of small stories out of the mega- narrative of the metropolis and ultimately transforming their own identity. According to the Townhouse, the work of Dabernig is a sort of personal archaeology of modernity. It displays an admiration for the utopian and rational, but also takes pleasure in gaps, mismatches and failures in such ideally conceived structures. In his photographs of football stadiums and fields, this Austrian artist juxtaposes the purism of geometry with the chaos of all that happens in situ. Luser uses drawing as an instrument to rapidly signify some of the visual material he has seen throughout his adult life: data collected to be output in room-size gallery installations. He tries to make sense of the visual material consumed and recycled each day, with a focus on things like network cables, window frames, aerials, light switches, power buttons and telecommunication masts... Jirkuff 's series of short video loops contain hand, foot or body movements: gestures which mirror the way we move, or act, and the space we use. These include "belly dancing" as an aesthetic reference and "hands with pills" as a universal gesture of choice. Huber 's video-sound installation is a portrait of the Tiring department store in Ataba Square, which was built in 1910 for the Austrian department store mogul Victor Tiring, while Plavcak professes an interest in inversions and doubles, exploring the possibility of a democratic simultaneity of content and form in her murals, which have themes like strangeness, black matter and how a painting deals with its surroundings.
