Using stories, photographs, video vignettes, Arabic music and Coptic songs played on the violin, Christian Stejskal takes the audience on a journey through the lives of seven different human beings in Cairo's rubbish areas. He depicts their joys and personal trials, tragedies and life's small triumphs.
What: The multimedia performance: My Neighbourhood
When: 25 September
Time: 6.00 pm
Where: Centre for Northern Peoples, Culture Hall
Duration: 90 minutes
Ticket price: 100,-
«My Neighbourhood» is a performance about politics, religion, revolution, pigs, rubbish, love and friendship. The audience is drawn into Christian Stejskal's personal and colourful pilgrimage from his native Vienna via Jerusalem to the holy city of Aksum in northern Ethiopia. Along the way, he meets the «Zabaleans», Cairo's unofficial Christian garbage workers in the so-called «Garbage City» in Cairo. Stejskal moved into the garbage city and lived with the Zabaleens, while making a living as a violinist at the Cairo Opera.
Christian Stejskal
Christian Stejskal is a Norwegian violinist, photographer and storyteller based in Cairo. He has studied violin at music academies in Copenhagen, Hanover and Bern. He has played with most of the symphony orchestras in Norway, and has also given a number of solo concerts.
For the past five years, he has been photographing life among the rubbish workers, while also writing short stories from Søppelbyen, a work that has received support from Fritt Ord and the Thomas Fearnley, Heddy and Nils Astrup Foundation.
Stejskal is a self-taught photographer and reached the final of the Anthropographia International Photo Awards (2012) with a subsequent exhibition of 25 of his photos in New York. In the same year, he won the Audience Award for his contribution to the Ljubliana International Photo Award. The project about the Zabelins, Cairo's unofficial garbage workers, is his largest photo project to date.
The Zabele - Cairo's unofficial garbage workers
The Zabeleen make up around 80,000 people who are spread across seven different areas in Cairo. The largest area is Mount Mokatt, also known as «Garbage City». Over 90 per cent are Coptic Christians.
For generations, the Zabele have made a living collecting rubbish from households in Cairo for almost no payment. The Zabele recycle up to 80 per cent of the rubbish they collect. In comparison, most Western garbage companies cannot recycle more than 20 to 25 per cent of the garbage they collect.
In 2009, the Zabele were in the international media spotlight when the Egyptian government made the controversial decision to slaughter the Zabele's 350,000 pigs during the outbreak of international swine flu. This was their entire livelihood. The decision was met with massive criticism when the World Health Organisation declared that there was no risk of infection from pigs to humans.
Read more about the show:
My Neighbourhood (Christian Stejskal)
My Neighbourhood - the Zabaleen project, by Christian Stejskal, Youtube