CAIRO
The current exhibition continues a journey of several years. A city and a people revealed through memories, stories, shadows and absences. The life behind curtained windows, the lit basement of a house that seems uninhabited, and a half-open door, through which you get a glimpse of a conversation have fascinated me as far back as I can remember. The architecture of the past and present and the fragile relationship of a population to the physical structure of a town is a fascinating tale. The physical city, the brick and mortar that shelters the dreams and tragedies of its story-telling dwellers, fascinate us if only we would listen. They deserve our attention and care. Yet, often, they are neglected and disregarded through the devastation of war, politics, and greed. What you lose in this process of destruction and reinvention is an unimaginable human loss often disguised and excused as the price of human progress.
And so, when you visit Cairo, you would best abandon the temptation to fly over the city's narrow streets and unfamiliar smells and sounds in a borrowed balloon. It is best to enter and get lost in the maze. And if you travel on the raised highways that crisscross the city’s skyline, notice this sprawling other city, sprung up on the rooftops of the one below. Like the hanging gardens of Babylon, it thrives and cultivates a life of its own. Then how best to paint a city as old as time, as narrow and wide as a dream? How do you reconcile and comprehend the intricacies, contradictions, and complexities that will be the city within your limited frame? If you abandon the wooden frame's limits, let the city spill over the edge, and leave your canvas, it will continue its tale in your imagination. It will seduce and capture you. The city will guide you. It is only then that the fragments of your momentary glimpse will make the whole that will tell of passion, beauty, greed, ambition, and power.
"Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home."
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you've gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. C.P. Cavafy
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come. And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
C.P.Cavafy
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Interview by Honar Online