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Today’s Cairovisuals post features a mobile photographic project that comes out of Port Said. Perhaps a good way to introduce this project is to quote a key paragraph from Pierre Nora’s essay “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire”:
"The Acceleration of History: Let us try to gauge the significance, beyond metaphor, of this phrase. An increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear—these indicate a rupture of equilibrium. The remnants of experience still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral, have been displaced under the pressure of a fundamentally historical sensibility. Self-consciousness emerges under the sign of that which has already happened, as the fulfillment of something always already begun. We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left."
Which Remains project walks a fine line of documenting the little that is left of Egypt’s urban memory without falling in the traps of nostalgia. A difficult task. The photos are evocative of a sense of a constant state of disappearance of many features that shaped the modern Egyptian city. As urban wealth is deflated, as laws prescribe the death of historic buildings rather than their preservation, and as the state continues to unleash an unchallenged assault on urban heritage, a project such as Which Remains is in its own humble way a form of resistance through mobile photography posted on a facebook page. Visit the page here.
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