Prosody: an ode to the city

Abstract

The contemporary era has projected themes of spatial uncertainty and existentialism within our cities, and in response, cities have injected a sense of ambiguous complexity in our subconscious. More than ever, our postures are being dictated by global trends redefining our interpretation of the surrounding physical and non-physical settings. This essay is a visual extraction of a short film made by the author in December 2020 entitled Prosody: An Ode to the City, shortlisted for the Audience Award at the 1st edition of the City Space Architecture Film Festival in Bologna. The film is a series of still frames taken as snapshots from several footage shot by the author in two different cities, Weimar and Shanghai, between 2015 and 2017. Such experience is a flaneurie depiction of one’s stance in the city and the perceptual element embedded in our subconscious to make sense of our surrounding environment.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank City Space Architecture for recognizing the film and nominating it for the Audience Award at its 1st edition that was held in Bologna.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Akerman-Heidegger comes from the intersection of Belgian filmmaker Chantel Akerman’s 1975 arthouse film Jeanne Dielman – where the film portrays the life of a housewife and illustrates the everyday elements of the house, e.g. kitchen tools, to evoke loneliness – and German Phenomenologist Martin Heidegger for his analysis of existential phenomenology – the core structure of the lived experience.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Taher Abdel-Ghani

Taher Abdel-Ghani is an architect, urban researcher, lecturer assistant and an independent filmmaker. His research mainly focuses on analysing the urban environment through cinematic images, an idea that started in 2012 when he received his Bachelor degree in Architecture. After completing his double Masters degree in Advanced Urbanism from Germany and China in 2017, he gradually shifted his career from architecture practice to a full-time academic and researcher. Currently, he is a lecturer assistant at Modern Sciences and Arts University (MSA) in Cairo, teaching Architecture Design, History of Architecture and Research for Graduation Projects. Alongside his work, his academic publications explore an interdisciplinary approach to cinematic urbanism, covering other fields such as sociology and education. Additionally, some of his short films were screened in Egypt, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and USA. His 2019 short documentary, Cold Dissent, received the Best Short Film award at the 5th Biennale Spazio Pubblico Festival in Rome.