October Art Exhibition

All the Egyptian Firefly Tunnels artists are joining in a visual art exhibition in October..... Details are coming soon.....

Saturated Souls

After a full month of work, including 3 weeks of intensive workshop the FireFly Tunnels project successfully completed the Egyptian part of the work. The work was exhibited at Darb 17/18 under the title Saturated Souls.

All in all 21 artists exhibited their work. The exhibition included paintings, video shows, performances, poetry, installations, Photography etc.

The artists have proven to be extremely talented as they managed to create art using mediums which are out of their comfort zone. The exhibition drew many positive comments from the audience.

Congratulations to all the artists, with all our wishes for further successes.

We would like to thank lead artist and curator Tavia La Follette for all the effort and hard work she put in the residency and we look forward to receiving her for other projects in the future.

Thank you to all artists. You have made us very proud of you.

Enjoy & Believe

THE PROJECT

The Firefly Tunnel Project is an artist exchange between the U.S. and Egypt. The project is the concept of the U.S. based artist Tavia La Follette and was brought to Egypt via her acceptance as an Artist-in-Residence to ARE (Artist Residency Egypt). La Follette runs her own non-profit gallery/performance space in the United States called ArtUp. Together with ARE and ArtUp, La Follette has begun to Egyptian side of the Firefly Tunnel. ARE and its director Essam Serry, partnered with La Follette to not only gather an eclectic mix of Egyptian artists, but to also host the workshop and artists who are living outside of Cairo. ARE is currently providing an artistic home to 10 artists in there residency home based in Giza with a picturesque view of the pyramids.

ArtUp using U.S. based artists will run a parallel workshop/residency. A symbolic and technological (web site) tunnel will be built between Egypt and the States for the artists to exchange their ideas on art, cultural community and how to utilize performance art and installation as a road towards a common understanding of humanity. The words “performance art and installation” are used to describe the work as it invites various forms of artists to participate- poets, dancers, conceptual artists, musicians, actors, videographers, painters, essayist, sculptors etc. Because it is a virtual tunnel and can be accessed worldwide, this allows for the dialogue to open up to a global community. A final exhibition of the exchange will take place in the United States, bringing in 3-4 Egyptian artists to represent that side of the tunnel.

Firefly Tunnels, The Metaphorical Passageways

Firefly Tunnels are metaphorical passageways for the exchange of ideas through the language of Performance Art. One could think of them as an Underground Railroad that crosses the border of language, a system of tunnels that doesn't believe in the barriers of countries or in the obstruction of segregated tongues.

Tavia La Follette