Squaring the Circle

Lazughli Square, Talaat Harb Square, Muhammad Farid Square

"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 use of fabric in Cairo to create spaces for everyday and festive practices of inspired us to use fabric as a material for three of the images in “Squaring the Circle.” We chose fabric for these works because of the beautiful, flexible, and temporary architectural built from colourful and patterned fabric in the urban texture of Cairo, and its use alludes to the historical tent-making culture in the region as well as the the phenomenon of tents used of displaced people in refugee camps.

We documented Lazughli Square, Talaat Harb Square, and Muhammad Farid Square in downtown Cairo, and after folding the image and altering its perspective to form the square with a void at the centre, we produced black and white jacquard knitted textiles of each square. The black and white jacquards refer to analogue photography, but in jacquard, the positive-negative aspect of an image is visible on the two sides of the textile. These textile works are mounted on light and moveable metal structures which make spaces that unfold their potential to create various viewing positions and perspectives.