[spectre] (fwd) Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Pericentre Projects /
Townhouse Gallery of contemporary art

Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
January 16th -17th, 2009

Rawabet Theatre
3 Hussein Al Me'mar Pasha Street
off Mahmoud Basiouny Street
Downtown, Cairo

<http://kharita.org>http://kharita.org


 
					The 
Kharita symposium is the first public event of an 
ongoing initiative that explores multiple urban 
orders simultaneously at play within Cairo.

In recent years, suburban complexes and town 
centres have been emerging along the outskirts of 
the capital at an unprecedented scale. These 
real-estate developments are under construction 
in parallel to an incessant proliferation of 
informal settlements across the city's districts. 
Meanwhile, educational institutions, 
multi-national corporations and government 
apparatuses are moving out of the centre and into 
those new zones.

At a moment when notions of centre and periphery 
collapse into each other, we invite a number of 
architects, artists, curators, urban planners and 
scholars to rethink what it means to live in 
Cairo. Through a series of interviews, lectures, 
videos, panels and performances, we look at how 
the circulation of power operates within the 
city, while inscribing our notions of value, 
difference and desire.

We approach the current moment of building cities 
as a potential site for articulating new 
positions vis-à-vis sentiments of nostalgia and 
the function of criticality. The Kharita 
symposium considers the impact of cities-to-be on 
art practices and discursive activity in Cairo.

Contributors:

Amr Abdel Awi, Sherif el-Azma, Hisham Bahgat, 
Clare Davies, Eric Denis, Marwan Fayed, Markus 
ElKatsha, Alaa Khaled, Aglaia Konrad, Samir 
el-Kordy, Akram al-Magdoob, Omar Nagati, Marion 
von Osten, Katja Reichard, Joseph Schechla, Peter 
Spillmann and Brian Kuan Wood.

The Kharita symposium is organised by Pericentre 
Projects (Nida Ghouse, Malak Helmy & Shahira 
Issa), in collaboration with the Townhouse 
Gallery of contemporary art.

Project Co-ordinator: Dalia Suleiman