While they have raised tempers and fears of irreversible change, Cairo’s changing attires have also been the subject of artists’ reflections over the years. The Townhouse Gallery’s current exhibition, “Model Citizens, is a case in point.
Behind “Model Citizens are Dutch artists Elke Uitentuis and Woulter Osterholt. Their aim is to stir the attention and imagination of urban communities by intervening in the shape of public spaces.
The outcome is a process of rethinking space that is otherwise taken for granted.
One year ago, Uitentuis and Osterholt arrived in Cairo for a residency program at the Townhouse Gallery. They spent a lot of time in nearby coffeehouses thinking about possible interventions that would be sensible to Cairo’s contentious public space. When it seemed difficult to take to the streets, they opted for what they refer to as “an alternative reality.
In the first floor of the Townhouse Gallery, a room-sized maquette reproduces the Downtown neighborhood of the gallery. Meticulous details in this small-scale model connote active engagement, rather than a static reproduction based on accurate measurements. Uitentuis and Osterholt, along with local artists, spent a year interviewing people who live and work in the area. They captured their memories and tangled their narratives to give birth to “Model Citizens.
The maquette, as it stands, is not an end product. The exhibition is a work in progress. Once opened, the artists reconvene their interlocutors and ask: “If there were no financial or legal restrictions, what would you change in the neighborhood?
They collect peoples’ reveries and deliver them within this alternative reality.
Residents relayed a host of dreams, from a performing space on the rooftop of a nearby rundown palace to a better looking car-free paved street. By the time the exhibition closes, the maquette will look quite different; for now it carries the breadth of people’s realities, it will later carry their dreams and aspirations.
“We are not offering urban solutions. We are not urban planners, said Uitentuis. “We are just providing a tool to catch people’s dreams . a certain color dissonance starts taking place in the neighborhood, as individuals have been asking for splashy green paints of their houses, when other buildings remain faintly grey.
“Our work is based on how people relate to their spaces, to their surrounding, she reiterates. This dissonance is symptomatic of chaos, and chaos, in turn, is psychedelically colorful.
The work has resonated well with many of the neighborhood’s residents. “It reminds us of our place and shows everyone our history, said a young man who works in the neighborhood. “I learned a lot from the project about the history of the neighborhood. It is changing my views about it.
His pitch for changes in the maquette include the addition of a clinic and a bazaar.
The maquette is well put in the historic context of the neighborhood, as narrated and reproduced by oral accounts, academic sources and archival material.
In an interesting manifestation of research-based art, the room leading to the maquette hosts a visual presentation of the neighborhood’s development, ever since it was “an untouched area where the Nile floods used to leave lakes behind. The presentation’s material is largely based on previous documentation undertaken by journalists, urban planners and academics.
Just adjacent to this room, another component of “Model Citizens houses a sound documentary reconstructing the narratives collected from the residents. It is played in a dark room that hints to the black box found on a plane or a ferry.
The exhibition at large is a witty orchestration by the artists of different forms, engaging their hosts in a visual, audible alternative to their daily lives.
It might bring the concept of contemporary art one step closer to a neighborhood living off the beats of both a tough and tender Cairo.
This can break the invisible barriers of mutual understanding between the gallery’s presence and the cohort of mechanics, coffeehouses workers and wall painters working in the same area. But more importantly, it is an invitation to revisit the space the way it’s lived, perceived and conceived by the community, to borrow the classification of space theorist Henri Lefebvre.
