Arno Löbbecke

or The entering into the land of Cockaigne

The exodus from Egypt is one of the fundamental codes of our Western civilization. It stands for the faith in the improvability of the earthly conditions. At the same time it is also the archetype of an escapist utopia: the yearning for a better world. Egypt is therewith the template of a dystopia, an anti-utopia.

The Copts – who has always considered themselves as the real descendants of the ancient Egyptians – set out to leave Egypt after two thousand years of suppression. Alas, it is far too late: Today’s ongoing global exodus has lost its original religious denotation. The exodus into the Promised Land has become the entering into the land of Cockaigne.

The collision of materialistic promise und religious expectation for salvation constitutes the ambiguous background of this exodus – strictly speaking this is the motif of the founding myth of the New World, America.

Alas, the New World isn’t new anymore: the claims are already marked. The society is constituted of separate communities who live in parallel worlds. The Copts has been allocated a lot in the neutral colonial grid. Just as there are China Towns, Little Indias etc. the Copts want to build up a community as a focus point of identification: the Coptic Village. Also in this case the fundamental questions of alieness and home, of identity and integration generate frictions in the lives of the exiles.

But the Christian Churches have gained enormous experience in coping with alieness over the past two thousand years. As one of the first global enterprises the Church has developed a set of simple tools for recognisability. The most significant element of this corporate identity is the alignment of all churches towards East. In doing so the non-affiliation to the surrounding social space in which the churches are located is made visible. But at the same time the twist expresses the belonging to a superior system with an ideal point of identification.

By superimposing two topoi – the local colonial grid of Toronto and the ideal Christian alignment towards East - the design tries to create a hybrid urban structure as the new Coptic corporate identity.

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