While driving around Cairo in the evenings, you see couples sitting by the Nile, families hanging out on the bridges and men gathered in coffee shops watching football matches.
“Tales Around the Pavements is a new contemporary art project held in the streets of Downtown Cairo, addressing how the population uses streets as a public domain. Seven artists are “playing with the idea of how people use the streets in each of their projects, explains curator Aleya Hamza.
This comes under the umbrella of an international program called “Meeting Point 5, a multi-disciplinary contemporary arts festival organized by the Young Arab Theater Fund taking place in the Middle East and North Africa this month.
It features a project entitled “Unclassified where a group of curators, from six different cities, were assigned to “propose an artistic program, tailor-made for the town they live in, mobilizing artists and cultural producers – often unknown to us – from different backgrounds, to reflect on their city.
Hamza and fellow curator Edit Molnar were interested in the growing difficulty of the average citizen in sharing public spaces with others. But using “Guerilla tactics, each person in the city finds their own special space on the steets of Cairo.
Each work is unique. Malak Helmy, for example, took an abandoned koshk (kiosk) and created an art space inside it. Her project, entitled “How to Make Your Body Double Overnight at Koshk, is rooted on concepts of wish-fulfillment and dream realization.
Another project by Eklego Design (a furniture and interior decorating firm) is to create a seating area on the railing of a bridge.
Artist Mohammed Allam’s “A Very Private Conversation takes the idea of intimate lovers sitting on the Corniche and creates an audio installation of a fictional conversation between the two.
Using a map, you can locate four of the artists on the streets downtown, but not all installations are immobile.
Kareem Lotfy’s “Catch Me If You Can involves a series of graphic interventions throughout the city. He will be stenciling some of the walls downtown but will not identify their locations. “Either you find it or you don’t . you have to keep your eyes open, says Hamza.
The team decided not to obtain legal permits for any of these projects, echoing the reality of Cairo in the sense of a negotiation between authority – and how they expect the streets to be treated – and the people who make it their public domain regardless.
“It is very experimental and unstable, we don’t know what reactions we are going to get, explains Hamza, “We don’t know the end result.
The project is being documented by the CIC (Contemporary Image Collective) and will be published in January.
The first installation “How To Make Your Body Double Overnight At Koshk opens today on the passageway between Mohamed Bassiouny St. and Kasr El Nil St., Downtown at 6:30 pm (until Nov. 15, 2007).
For more information and opening dates, visit http://www.meetingpoints.org and stay tuned to our cultural agenda for daily reminders.
