Amsterdam - Cairo
As an attempt to trace some of the violent memories our cities had gone through in the struggle for better living conditions, we constructed a walk through Amsterdam while exchanging your view with a person in Cairo.
As we settled in our new hometown Amsterdam, we brought with us our past experiences and memories which formed us as social and political subjects. We often heard in Amsterdam that political trouble happens elsewhere. Weighing injustices on a scale, and making an ordered list of atrocities or violence, is however a futile exercise. Is it even possible to measure suffering and say something meaningful about it? Any experience with violence is personal within a context. We want to deconstruct this tension, it’s different contexts and reflect on the intersections and similarities that do exist.
In This walk participants get to experience the changing image of both cities in relation to different socio-political events. Through a choreographed roadmap, a participant walks through the city centre in Amsterdam with headphones and a tablet. Meanwhile, they see and hear the parallel experience of a person walking in Downtown Cairo. The walk is double-layered with selected moments of history appearing as overlapped traces to the real-time experience. We focus on the 2011 Egyptian revolution in downtown Cairo and the recent evictions of squatters and student protests in Amsterdam’s city centre.
Media coverage :
- Amsterdam Alternative
https://amsterdamalternative.nl/articles/10242/against-a-politics-of-forgetting
- Movement Exposed
https://movementexposed.com/2020/09/17/amsterdam-fringe-festival-2020-part-2/
The Walk was presented :
Oct 2021 W139 , as part of the group exhibition "That those being be not being"
Sep 2020 Amsterdam Fringe Festival
Aug 2018 Amsterdam Fringe Festival