A PROJECT BY AMELIE JAKUBEK

How to ethically identify groups, methodologies and frameworks for transnational
artistic action (with European participation) in order to induce sustainable
and inclusive social change?

This research aims to explore methodologies for creating collective agency through artistic means. The methodology I experimented with within this bigger framework is centered around the swimming pool as a global architectural, political, ecological and social actor. By speaking through the swimming pool socio-economic and physical dimensions are taken into account in order to ask questions about how we act on our relationships emotionally, physically and politically, but also how we construct ourselves through each other.

The specificity of a pool’s location concepts reveals reciprocal relationships across geographic and social demarcations, like nations and through. For this chapter I documented larger bodies of water in Egypt on video. I evaluated my documented material in relation to academic research and methodologies of allies (from waterdance to breathing with the head turned over). I immersed myself and my body in water. By doing so I closely assessed my colonizing subjectivity and gaps in knowledge which I tried to overcome in the poetic, personalized voice of the swimming pool in order to invite a future dialogue. The result is e.g. a pool reflecting on its position next to a road and several embassies in Cairo. Confronted with a specific type of masculinity and its yearning for romantic love, the pool identifies contemporary masculinity as a contradiction to post-colonial capitalist Egypt, referencing on its role in nation building in the past centuries.