ARTISTS UPSTAIRS

When Pittsburgh artist and activist Tavia La Follette of Shadyside traveled to Egypt in August 2010 for an artist-in-residence program, she had no idea that the revolution that would overthrow President Hosni Mubarak would soon unfold. Wanting to complete the residency as part of her dissertation in the hopes of earning a doctorate in Leadership and Change through Culture and the Arts at Antioch University, she thought the experience simply would help in her writing
an auto-ethnography about working with artists in the United States and Egypt.

"I originally wanted to do the exchange between Israel and Palestine, after being asked by the Israeli Consulate to represent this region and attend an exhibition of Israeli theater," La Follette says. "While I was there, I ventured over to Palestine. I had been working with Guillermo Gomez-Pena (a performance artist and activist) and was very interested in how to utilize the arts as a way to cross borders — physical, emotional, political and cultural borders."

La Follette then started to apply to residencies in the Middle East around the same time she found out she was pregnant with twins. Still, she was determined. "I knew the 10th anniversary of 9/11 was coming and wanted to do something revolving around prejudgment and cultural identity."

Not long after, she was asked to attend Artist Residency Cairo as the first artist in residence. "I stayed there for one month, bringing with me my two 7-montholds and my artist friend and baby-sitter Emily Laychak. This was prerevolution,in August 2010."

That's when she decided to start what she called the Firefly Tunnels Project (fireflytunnels.net), a kind of "virtual performance-art lab" in which artists can exchange ideas on an international scale.
"The overall goal of the project is to build a language of peace through the actions of art," La Follette says. Now, the project has evolved from the virtual world to the real world in the form of "Sites of Passage," the latest exhibit to open at the Mattress Factory's annex gallery on Monterey Street. For this Pittsburgh portion of the workshop-exhibit, La Follette and independent curator Katherine Talcott assembled the works of about half a dozen Egyptian artists and about half a dozen Pittsburgh artists, with some overlapping in between.
In some ways, the two art worlds — that of Pittsburgh and that of Egypt — are similar, at least demographically speaking.

"The contemporary art scene is quite small and I made lots of friends quickly,"La Follette says. "Because it is a Muslim-based society, much of what we learn in modern art is not taught there. However, the young people I worked with were very driven and self-taught. Most of the artists I taught in the workshop were under 30. Most of them were not well versed in installation or performance art."
La Follette says the artists were anxious to show Pittsburghers their city and their art. So much so that she was invited to come back to Egypt in March of this year to teach at an International Art School run by a renowned Egyptian painter, Mohamed Abla.

"Abla also runs the only political-cartoon saloon in the Middle East," says La Follette, whose husband is political cartoonist Gary Huck. "Gary was invited, too. And then the revolution broke out!"
"We decided to go anyway and with a delegation of U.S. artists who I knew I wanted to work with," La Follette says. "This is how the second trip (in March) to Egypt happened."
None of the Egyptian artists could come to Pittsburgh to create the works on display in the gallery. So, their designs for installation pieces were executed by Pittsburgh artists. For example, on the first floor, prints depicting subway riders by Cairo-based designer Noha Redwan have been mounted on the walls in an installation that replicates the inside of a subway train, which has been enhanced with graffiti painted by Pittsburgh graffiti artist Matt J. Hunter.

On the second floor, the walls in the corridor are painted with four poetic statements in Arabic written by Mostafa Sleem. Translated, they read: "The Power of Now," "Vanishing Point," "Tangible Feelings," "The Cultivation of Sense."

The works of the Egyptians are interspersed among pieces by Pittsburghers. For example, also on the first floor, a video installation titled "Grenadine," by Hyla Willis, an associate professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University, is displayed in a darkened room all by itself. In it, a pomegranate is punctured by the artist with toothpicks that have little American flags on them. Pomegranates are native to Iran and have been cultivated in Egypt since they were introduced by Hyksos invaders. Willis chose to use them as a symbol here
because "the pomegranate has been an important symbol of fertility and a vital medicinal food."

As for her part, La Follette says the biggest challenge she faced in regard to this project came on the first trip, when attending the residency program.

"The man who ran the program and I had very different philosophies of
working," she says. "He was a businessman, not an artist. He used intimidation to operate, where I try to use inspiration. I think he was a perfect example of how the old regime operated."

On the second trip, the biggest challenge was the revolution itself, although they did not fly in until Mubarak had stepped down.
"The State Department did not want us to go, our flight was cancelled, but we pursued, and went in via France," La Follette says. "Once we were in Egypt, everyone was extremely kind and happy that we were there." On Thursday, La Follette will lead a free public presentation detailing her Egyptian experiences beginning at 4:30 p.m. at Porter Hall 100 (at Gregg Hall) on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. More information about the project and the programming around it can be found at www.fireflytunnels.net.

Kurt Shaw can be reached at kshaw@tribweb.com