Cairo Now! Exhibition Texts
Mohamed Elshahed
Design is more global than ever. Trends sweep across geographical boundaries in unprecedented ways, and cities are the major nodes where the global is manifested. Architects and designers are increasingly mobile — albeit depending on what passport they carry. Hipster cafes look nearly the same whether in London, Berlin or Beirut, with salvaged wood details and Edison lights. Co-working spaces for young entrepreneurs the world over have Vitra chairs and stationary provided by a handful of international brands that have come to define the current cool. There is little difference between the products in an Ikea on the outskirts of Cairo and an Ikea in suburban New Jersey.
Marc Augé’s notion of “non-places” has taken on new manifestations since he coined it back in 1995 — when most of the designers featured in this exhibition were toddlers or teenagers, and the Internet had only recently become available in select households in Cairo. In terms of design, non-places today are no longer only international airports: many of our own domestic spaces now have little specificity to local design. But this is not an argument against the global or a call for resurrecting national or regional design — such attempts tend to be applied only in terms of superficial appearance, enacted after the death of local design as postmortem gestures by markets seeking to capitalize on the fetishization of the “authentic.” A “traditional” clay dish sold at a mall fashioned as a souq in Abu Dhabi is likely made in China, and designers in Cairo and London follow the same trends in ways that surpass the relationships they have with the provinces and villages around them.
Iconic City creates a unique space within Dubai Design Week for cities, first Beirut and now Cairo, to showcase how they fit into the world of design. But in this global context, what is the value of documenting design in a particular place?
Cairo Now! City Incomplete seeks to answer this question by presenting a portrait of the Egyptian capital today through its design culture. Despite being peripheral in terms of international design circuits, Cairo is both a place of vibrant vernacular design culture and home to resourceful designers who take the city as their muse — the source of their creativity. The exhibition showcases the work of over 60 designers, architects and design-centric research projects. Nearly all the featured designers are under 40, and most work from makeshift workspaces in their own residences. Cairo being the massive urban conglomerate that it is, most have not met one another. In this context, this exhibition is an act of activism that aims to record the design landscape of present-day Cairo, to help forge a network of its creative makers and to carve a way forward to realizing the potential of the city as a relevant locus on the global design map.
The exhibition’s subtitle takes its inspiration from the infamous visual impression of Cairo’s red-brick housing stock in varying stages of completion. The aesthetics of incompletion permeate Cairo’s design culture in content and form. It’s an ever-expanding metropolis of disconnected realities, including partly realized satellite cities full of the unfinished buildings of speculative urbanism, half-restored historic structures, and a disjointed transport system. City Incomplete points to the unfulfilled potential — the possibilities for making, producing and innovating — that the city’s designers strive for.
Designers in Cairo deal with conditions that both inspire their work and restrain their creativity. Importing certain materials and parts is difficult, and exporting products is complicated due to tight customs measures, licensing and bureaucracy. Selling online is not as simple as it should be and a constantly fluctuating currency makes such transactions increasingly complicated, particularly for small-scale design workshops that often consist of one or two designers. Locally, the marketplace is saturated with imported goods that make it difficult for individual designers to leave their mark.
In Cairo, residents build entire neighborhoods to accommodate their needs outside of government planning, and designers make due with what’s available to continue to create. Incompleteness turns into informality and everyone becomes a spontaneous designer in his or her search for everyday solutions. Thus, Cairo is a place of inspiration due to the resulting rich, often chaotic, visual culture, but it is also a difficult place to survive economically as a designer.
During the research phase to identify the city’s makers and designers, several trends emerged. These included up-cycling, revisiting fading crafts and an urge to fashion a new visual and calligraphic identity that is specifically Egyptian and contemporary. These trends, as well as the state of design education in Egypt today, are discussed in articles in the following pages provided by the journalists and writers of Mada Masr, Egypt’s leading independent journalism outfit.
The exhibition is organized around several loosely defined categories: Furniture and product design (such as Reform Studio, Up-fuse, Menn Baladha, Studio Meem), architecture (Shahira Fahmy, Samir El Kordy), graphic design and branding (such as Ahmad Hammoud, Amro Thabit, Ghada Wali, Salma Shamel), in addition to several research-based initiatives that focus on documenting the city’s urban condition (Takween, Cluster) and its vernacular design culture (Samaklaban, Dead Walls, Found Khatt). The exhibition space, designed by architect Adham Selim, is not merely a backdrop — it’s a fundamental part of the exhibited works.
In the ever-more globalized design culture, Cairo’s unique urban condition informs in very specific ways the processes by which design objects are produced. Cairo’s contemporary design landscape is a work in progress but it offers an important contribution to our wider understanding of how things are made in response to local realities. The exhibition brings together works from multiple design disciplines, which when shown together manifest an alternative portrait of Cairo now.
‘The future is here:’ On design education in Egypt
Yasmine Zohdi
For decades, the main supplier of designers in Egypt was the state-run Helwan University’s Faculty of Applied Arts and Faculty of Fine Arts. But the founding of design programs at the German University in Cairo (2006) and at the American University in Cairo (2011) has created a shift, tipping the balance in favor of the private sector and paving the way for an evolving design culture in the country.
It seems to be a common view that a vibrant design scene is growing and thriving in Cairo as part of a greater movement sweeping the region, despite the challenges posed by Egypt’s current political climate and its education system.
[Read full article here]
Heritage in design: Embracing flux and function over blind nostalgia
Lara El Gibaly
I was intrigued, I admit, when a pop-art-meets-nostalgia design trend took over Cairo’s homeware stores about six years ago. The products had “western” color schemes and patterns while promoting Egyptian pop heritage.
I could now enjoy a warm beverage in a mug that was like me, a mix of things that shouldn’t really go together — Om Kalthoum’s face meets Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints. But after evermore coasters, posters, serving trays and t-shirts emerged featuring iconic figures from Egypt’s “golden era” I began to tire of the deluge of products and their superficial rendering of Egyptian identity, not to mention my own superficial consumption of it.
Talking to several young Egyptian product and furniture designers featured in Dubai Design Week’s exhibition Cairo Now: City Incomplete this month, I found I was not alone. In attempting to find answers for my questions — in a global design culture, what do phrases like cultural appropriation, self-exoticism, and “authentically Egyptian” even mean anymore? — I found that for each of these designers working with so-called Egyptian heritage takes very different forms, but that function, craft, visions for the future and creative thinking are key.
[Read full article here]
Shahira Fahmy: A career that responded to a revolution
Ingy Higazy
Like many architects, Shahira Fahmy’s activities bridge practice, research and academia. But she is also very much involved in quite different activities, and this likely informs her unusual approach.
As someone who produces her products and designs primarily through what she calls a process of subtraction, the 42-year-old prides herself on making use of whatever is offered to her. She points to a white cup she created out of a single block of clay as an embodiment of her whole approach.
[Read full article here]
Hopes for an Arabic type boom: Breaking the rules but not too far
Lara El Gibaly
There are 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet. There are four possible written forms for each letter, depending on whether it stands alone, or occurs at the beginning, middle or end of a word. Then there are the diacritic symbols, indicating the script’s correct pronunciation, that hover gently above or below each letter’s lines and curves.
What does this all spell out? A tough challenge for aspiring Arabic type designers.
“There is no content online for learning Arabic type design, so for designers who are self-taught like myself, it’s very difficult to learn,” says Mohammed Gaber, founder of Kief type foundry.
[Read full article here]
Global up-cycling design trend finds itself at home in Cairo
Rowan El Shimi
Strolling through Lisbon’s hilltop alleys in 2008, I came across a shop selling uniquely designed up-cycled products: a milk-carton wallet, a liquor-bottle lamp and a cereal-box notebook cover. In my young, hopeful state, I felt right at home. It embodied how I wanted people to live: without waste, with creativity and with possessions that carry a cause.
The shop wasn’t one of a kind, of course. Due to awareness campaigns, the economically privileged around the world were shifting consumption habits and looking for organic, locally produced and environmentally friendly food, clothes, furniture and transport. Designers, farming initiatives and business people were stepping up to be part of the movement.
[Read full article here]
Living temporarily, thinking temporarily: Artists on Cairo’s everyday design solutions
Rowan El Shimi
Walking down most Cairo streets, you’re likely to find a bicycle transformed into a vehicle for picking up junk, a shop made of sheet wood and vegetable crates or a group of children playing football with a plastic soda bottle.
Cairo is a city that’s constantly making do with what it has, a city in constant flux. Decades of overpopulation, poor structural planning and tough economic conditions for most of its inhabitants mean that, for better or for worse, it is full of physical manifestations of everyday design creativity.
During a four-month residency program at Townhouse gallery in 2015, Dutch artist Joran Koster —who had created Converted Bicycles, documenting repurposed bikes in India, the previous year — closely followed these street design solutions. Limiting his search to Townhouse’s neighborhood, which has socio-economic diversity and many craftspeople, he found several gems.
[Read full article here]
On Samir El Kordy: Dystopian architecture and new fantasies
Jenifer Evans
Samir El Kordy is a tall, slim, soft-spoken man whose love of contradiction feels almost perverse. “Ignorance is the main virtue in this project,” the architect tells me, speaking of the house he’s currently building, his fifth. He calls it the Gym House because the neighbors and authorities are convinced that it’s a gym, not a home.
When he first went to the site in Rehab City, New Cairo, with the client, he immediately saw the commission was going to be a challenge. It was to be built in the half-subterranean ground floor of an apartment building and totally hidden by a high wall surrounding the property — a “wrapped condition.”
“What I liked about it was that it’s full of faults,” he says.
[Read full article here]
*A Cairo edition of this special Cairobserver issue will be released in December including additional pages, and all articles in Arabic and English.
**Publication design by Ahmad Hammoud