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Art in a Revolution: A Conversation with Lara Baladi
The ongoing relocation of administrative and ministerial functions to the New Administrative Capital is leaving an array of late-19th to mid-20th century buildings in central Cairo vacant and awaiting conversion. Its role previously limited to providing a clean slate for private development through "restoring order," the state is now looking to private developers' decade-long experience with arts-led redevelopment in Downtown that has fully materialized with the gush of creative industries since 2011. Descendants of the 1990s contemporary arts scene and the earlier 1970s literary counterculture, Downtown's creative industries emerged in a rare period of complete creative autonomy during and after the 2011 revolution. They have taken a distinctive form right in between an extralegal marginal "creative underclass" and a formalized "creative elite." Inspired by the Global North's model of instrumentalization of arts and culture to "revitalize" decaying downtowns, specialized private developers were instead faced with a creative scene saturated with socially and politically subversive overtones. In tandem with the state's efforts to sterilize Downtown of all remnants of dissidence and informality, Downtown's creative industries have undergone a process of capitalistic conditioning. Among cases of co-optation, re-framing, and resistance, entrepreneurial creative spaces have sprung up—presenting a sanitized version of creativity ideal for neoliberal redevelopment agendas. Concerns about gentrification are often shut down as an imported Anglo-American construct that has no place in the Global South. This has inspired a new discourse that attempts to uproot, redefine, and localize the concept. This thesis attempts to plug into this dialogue by unraveling the multi-layered convolutions of heritage, capital, art, and dissidence, and analyzing their implications on the social and built environments. Through looking at the intersections between adaptive reuse, creative industries, and arts-led redevelopment, an attempt is made to understand post-2011 Downtown Cairo. And by looking through Cairo's lens, the shapes adaptive reuse and creative industries take become clear representations of changing socioeconomic and political narratives.
Images of mass protests that arose from Egypt in early 2011 enraptured global audiences with unexpected scenes of street politics and unprecedented possibilities for political change. While the presence of thousands of cellphone cameras, perhaps hundreds of thousands, provided the technology for a multitude of witnessing, the hyper-visibility of the street in times of protest made image-making practices both threatening and powerful. The recursive rehabilitation of counter-revolutionary images happened on many fronts. Western journalists have long characterized the “Arab Street” as a “barbarous urban mob” and, despite enchantment with the “Arab Spring,” still perpetuated a simplistic analysis of street politics in the region. Meanwhile local television, advertising, and music videos endlessly recycled revolutionary images in superficial modes of patriotic sentimentality; while the urban poor, unable to realize the aims of “bread, freedom, and social justice,” have suspiciously remained the unclaimed image of the Egyptian revolution. But by attending to the social life of revolutionary street media, this article reviews the potential for emerging image practice to cultivate new kinds of political subjectivity and collectivity.
This article discusses the abject in Naguib Mahfouz's The Beggar, and how it is related to the poetic crisis of its protagonist. It uses Julia Kristeva's definition of the abject, which means an impure maternal element and a negative force, and its related term, abjection, which refers to being on a liminal space between the animalistic and the cultural and between the semiotic and the symbolic. Because Omar Hamzawi quit writing poetry, he could not sublimate the abject other within him. Immersed in the abject, he suffers from symptomatic depression and he himself becomes abject. His body becomes his poetic text disintegrating into nothingness. He tries to commit suicide in order to relapse to a pre-linguistic space where he achieves a union with the m/other. However, he fails to do so and returns to the symbolic by recalling a poetic line.
This paper makes use of Kristeva's concepts of the revolution and the more recent one of revolt. While the first one relates the personal and the aesthetic with the social, the second one focuses solely on the psychic as it is represented in art and psychoanalysis. As the microcosmic leads necessary to the macrocosmic, an amalgamation between the two terms becomes more functional. The Egyptian Revolution is shown here as the perfect model of this aesthetic, political revolution where creativity burst in the form of death drive. The semiotic and the feminine penetrate Tahrir Square and abjection becomes the quality of its tenuous borders. This means that although the Egyptian revolution is artistic, it is destructive and pathological compelling revolutionaries to repudiate their revolution to restore order. © 2015 DAR Publishers/University of Jordan. All Rights Reserved.
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