"Squaring the Circle" is a series of photo-based images, woven as jacquard work or on paper as wallworks, of famous squares in downtown Cairo. The series addresses the massive transformations of the urban environment in contemporary Cairo at the moment.

The illustrations from early Muslim travel guides to Mecca employ an ingenious and practical form of representation of the spaces and architecture of Mecca. The multiperspectival architectural drawings and gouaches of Hassam Fathy, an architect associated with critical regionalism with a global south perspective, pick up and adapt some of these beautiful forms of spatial representation from these travel guide maps. Inspired by these effective yet complex forms of spatial representation, and by Fathy’s innovations of this knowledge, we adapted an approach to represent the changing character of Cairo’s public space, particularly public squares. In our adaptation, the buildings in the urban space are folded away from the centre of the image, leaving a void, or an empty square in the middle of the image.

The empty centre of the large-scale wallpaper of the Tahrir Square is framed by modernist buildings such as (the now empty) Mogamma, the Central Administration Building of Egypt from 1952, the National Museum, and by a range of international Hotels such as Cleopatra, Steigenberger, Ritz Carlton, Semiramis. Named after the revolutions in 1919 and 1954, the Tahrir (Liberation) Square, is known internationally as a site of the Arab Spring when citizens occupied the square and it became a focal point of wide-spread political demands.

However, since the uprisings of 2011, the public and political use of the square has been restrained and controlled. The traffic roundabout encircling the square has been redeveloped into a monumental site of national history. An ensemble of obelisks and statues of sphynxes on huge pedestals camouflage a new spatial urban politics of control.

Shifting Perspectives: Tahrir Square
Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber and Huda Lutfi
(Wallpaper: 300 x 300 cm, 2025)

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