El Gorna Village-The Umbilical Cord To The Chambers Of The Ancestors by Salwa Rashad

Public Project

El Gorna Village-The Umbilical Cord To The Chambers Of The Ancestors

Copyright Salwa Rashad 2024

Date of Work Mar 1992 - Apr 2008

Updated Nov 2018

Location Luxor, Egypt

Topics Black and White, Documentary, Film, Landscape, Photography, Photojournalism, Portraiture, Travel

It was my first visit in 1992 to El Gorna Of The Mountain on the west side of the Nile in Luxor, since then i revisited the Village of El Gorna several times till 2017. During these years, the houses of the village of El Gorna which inhabited the mountain has always been under the threat of demolish, these houses with their beautiful drawings of different subjects and designs adorned its walls, paintings and drawings of the pilgrimage, floral and animal shapes and geometric patterns all covered the walls of the houses inside and outside. Though this part of Luxor retained the contradiction and oddity to maintain between two period of times or two eras, one in the present that inhabits these houses on the surface of the mountain of El Gorna that goes back between 100 and 300 years old, Yet another period of time and era was running just beneath the surface that goes back to 3000 years ago and maybe more, as the tombs and cemeteries of the ancient Egyptians also adorned with beautiful paintings of floral drawings, Hieroglyphic scripts and the journey of the deceased sailing to the other world, both eras living the same place at the very moment until the authority decided it was time to completely put down the houses on the surface, houses of the present time. It was in 2008 that the task was completely finished and all houses were demolished except for very few ones. Perhaps no other solutions were offered to keep these houses as preservation of the modern human heritage or to transform them into artist studios or cultural centres. In these photos i tried to document the last days during the demolish and after evacuating the area and closing down the artisan shops that makes Alabaster artefacts and removing them to another place .

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Salwa Rashad

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