What must humanity remember in order to build a shared future?

Libraries are humanity's answer to forgetting.

Yet every generation inherits more than books. It inherits gestures, stories, rituals, languages, values, ways of seeing the world, and ways of relating to one another. Civilization survives not only through what is recorded, but through what is transmitted. Today, societies possess unprecedented access to information, yet increasingly struggle with attention, trust, continuity, and meaningful connection.

REBUILDING HUMANITY asks what happens when cultural memory becomes fragmented, accelerated, or lost. What forms of knowledge can be archived, and what forms of wisdom remain dependent upon living transmission?

Created specifically for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the project brings together architecture, film, choreography, music, and collective participation to explore the foundations upon which civilizations endure.

Civilization is not inherited automatically. Information can be stored. Wisdom must be transmitted. The question is not whether humanity will be rebuilt. The question is how.

THE FIRST LIBRARY

Before humanity inscribed knowledge into books, it inscribed knowledge into bodies.

Long before libraries, archives, alphabets, and institutions, human beings transmitted understanding through movement, ritual, storytelling, song, observation, and collective practice.

Knowledge lived within experience before it lived within systems of record.

The body was the first vessel of knowledge.

Rebuilding Humanity brings this living archive into dialogue with one of humanity’s most powerful symbols of collective memory: the library.

ALEXANDRIA

For centuries, Alexandria has been a meeting point between civilizations — a place where ideas, discoveries, traditions, and different ways of understanding the world have crossed paths and shaped one another.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina carries this history into the present as a space dedicated to knowledge, inquiry, exchange, and collective memory.

Here, the living archive of the body encounters the archive of the library, creating a dialogue between inheritance and possibility, memory and transformation, past and future.

Alexandria is not the backdrop to this encounter.
It is one of its authors.

REBUILDING HUMANITY

Concept, Choreography & Film Direction: Daniel Proietto (choreography developed in close collaboration with the performers)

Performers: Héléna Pikon, Douglas Letheren, Yolanda Correa, Shaymaa Shoukry, Gregory Lau, Helena Olmedo, Neebal Abu Dan, Shelmith Øseth, Besan Ja’ara and Saya Bringuier

Lights Design: Sigve Sælensminde 

Sound Design: Alan Lucien Øyen & Svein Sandvold

Cinematography: Diego Barrero

Film Editing: Mauro Proietto

Co-Editor: Lara Marcela Fernandez Tedesco

Producer: Irhana Šehović

Developed within Rethinking Rebuilding Symposium

Organized by Snøhetta Foundation, Humane Urbanism

Hosted by Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Produced by Know Nation

Know Nation has received travel support from
PAHN – Performing Arts Hub Norway through the scheme funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Rebuilding Humanity.