Thinking through hands – a visit to the Wissa Wassef Art Centre in Cairo

Yoanna and I were both raised here, and both left to pursue another career but also came back as we were needed. Our stories are similar, yet different. My mom was traveling for a short while for health reasons, and I had to take over. This step was very important. The people here didn’t know me as a director or teacher, so this very short period showed them that I’m still one of you, that I’m here. My mom also taught me how to look at the artworks and how to write about it. Today we have a third generation of young children and weavers here, and they’re looking at me as the future. I’m learning a lot at the moment.

There are many layers to it. It’s about the educational system, the labor conditions. Our weavers have their own schedule, they decide the time and they are totally free to go and come as they please. When they have young children, they can bring them with them. They sit beside them in the room or sleep, and play with the other kids in the garden. It’s simple: the mother is more at ease when she can bring her children. She’s not worried about them. And then also when they grow older, the children are allowed to try anything they want. I mean, we all live beside one another. I mean, the kids are totally free and everybody looks after them. People work with us for years, sometimes their whole life, we really are one big family.

The aim of the centre is for the child to express themselves freely from a very young age, not to be afraid to try new things or put their ideas out. We never impose an idea or say: this is wrong, this is not nice, you should do this or that. It’s their own. They can discover their own imagination and put it in a tapestry or whatever form of art. Our aim is not just to build tapestries. Any form of expression, any craft will help enlarge imagination and form personality. Children have different personalities, sometimes difficult, sometimes shy and without a voice. All these different personalities need different art forms.

Ramses didn’t even take the kids to museums because he didn’t want them to think, “I’m never going to be this good. Look at these artists.” He didn’t want an impression printed in their head as he wants theirs to come out. So we don’t tell them what to do. Sometimes we tell a story or take them in the garden and move together, enjoy the sun, the dogs, the animals, and then at the end they find their own idea. Just help them to use their eyes and their mind.

So we keep on telling that it’s the adults who have to change their perception of art, not the children. Because that’s our perception from accumulated viewing of other people’s work, of being taught that this is how it should be done. The other thing is Ramses hated that the art world was very prejudiced, colonial, elitist. They divided the artist and the craftsman. The artist is someone worthy of being called an artist and selling expensively, while a craftsman is just basically a tool. He thought this was destroying the art world because art has to be used in order to survive and have any meaning. And the craftsman was the original artist.

When they started with the building, I had a choice either to feel bad about it, or we could just try to include them as much as possible. When my grandparents started, this was a small village surrounded by agricultural land, and a few families who knew each other. Now we have problems with drugs and pollution, it’s becoming more of a ghetto. We don’t know which way it will turn, so we have to take this project also outside of Harrania. Not to remove it from the children and location, but to include more people of different ages and conditions.

Ramses started his project with the children in Old Cairo in 1941, but the school wanted him to teach traditional designs, and copy them for profit. So eventually he had to leave and start over in Harrania with a few of the children from the school. He understood that if you want something to live, you have to let it change and you have to keep moving with it. That’s what we are doing now.

When Ramses opened the centre in the 1950’s and chose to establish the center in a farming village, to use hand looms and natural dyes from plants grown here on site, to embrace slowness and refuse mass production, it wasn’t nostalgia, but a refusal of the colonial narrative that equated progress with industrialization and rationalization. Imagine a post-colonial Egypt struggling to honor its own heritage while also modernizing and becoming “relevant” on the world stage. I mean, Ramses proposed something radical: abandoning the very mechanism that had kept Egyptian crafts alive for centuries. The knowledge transmitted through apprenticeship, the child learning from their master. Techniques were fixed, inherited, passed down through families and guilds across generations.

I think since my grandfather wanted this centre to become the education system and not just a museum, an artwork, a gallery or a community; the next step has to be that we start reaching out to people outside of the community. The good thing is that social media allows us to send out our message. Before, sometimes reporters came, taking what they wanted from our lives’ work and owning it for their purposes. Now we have a way to educate people directly without the middlemen.

Some people look at our work like it’s children’s work or outsider art, because it comes from a village and was made by people who don’t have a degree. Even if their work hangs in museums worldwide. But slowly this attitude is changing. People, and the Egyptian press, don’t make fun of the artists anymore but still they don’t show the same respect they would any artist with a diploma, especially from abroad.

If you are allowed to express yourself freely without being judged, you can reach this stage. We say it’s the marriage of the intellect and instinct that made it work. It’s not simplifying it, by saying it’s just instinct, but the innate need to create—not just the Egyptian human, not just the farmer, just human—that intellectual force is what brought this level of artistry out. This is very important. It’s allowing talking and thinking at the same time, thinking through hands.

Of course. But I think something very important is that they feel safe and loved and respected in their decision making. You have to be prepared to help them without imposing your own views. This is not easy. When you guide someone, you have to respect their personality and you have to repress your own ideas. I can suggest something, but I have to accept if they say, no, that’s not what I want to do. At the same time, kids are very intelligent. Sometimes they look at my face and they know if I like what they did or not. It’s not always easy, but it is for me and you to learn, not the kid.

And you must know that we teach the children the rudiments of weaving, but they have to find their own technical solutions to their problems. Like how to make a vertical line without creating holes in the weave, or weaving a circle, or putting one design in front of the other, all these are challenges that demand effort and concentration from the child, but once they achieve it, they are very proud and gain confidence in their abilities, which then again encourages them to be creative and try new designs and challenges.

Agreed. It is a very important thing to understand, that we are all studying. It’s not just a school, a formal school, or a social community project, we are a family, educated in the arts.