Demonstrations to Redruth, Cornwall – Art in Cairo

From 2000 to 2002 I was making small sculptures/installations in Cairo. I was living downtown, immersed in the culture of Nadi Il Telegraph (the Telegraph Club). I was working with shoeshine boys to create stuff. Lugging huge blocks of ice around and doing these things on street corners. Balancing blocks of ice on old telephones that we would get form the Souk il Gamaa. Crowds and security police. Questions, getting followed………The fatwa because I got, Foad, the old carpenter to make me a shoeshine boys box so it exactly fitted a Koran – me in my naivety thinking it was a poetic image of god pervading poverty. On the top of shoeshine boxes there is a stirrup to place the foot on whilst you get it shined. People weren’t not happy about the inference of a foot on the Koran, or the Koran set in a lowly shoeshine boys box. And me thinking that I would just get a jeweler to make me an ornate silver shoeshine boys box to keep my Koran in. That really clumsy awkwardness of cultural misunderstanding that art doesn’t address, doesn’t need to address, doesn’t choose to address. then buying sparrow hawks from the Souk Il Tyar, beautiful terrified things that would pose before I would release them.

Ice Dominoes – making giant dominoes out of blocks of ice and trying to play in the street. Some things are beyond organisation….. a game of dissolution.

Watching Al Jazeera News, the same streets, now filled with everyone. There was a shot of the protesters, thousands of them, at the sunset prayers, just before the curfew was to set in, stopping their demonstrating and as a  lined mass performing their prayers. Proper interventions in the street. This sculpture, this ice on telephones, just emanated a new set of meanings, just taken on a new life.

At the time there was a lot of talk about creative street interventions against the ruling order, a couple of Egyptians were organising Critical Mass like bicycle rides. A theater group had all got arrested for doing an impromptu performance deemed “political”. I kind of avoided all that. I think I’d read some Lyotard but art as intervention into public space but I organized my team of shoeshine boys a bit Fagin-like to make these found sculptures, usually with ice that dripped in the midday sun, their excitement and care about the birds, running around finding things, them getting familiar with the aesthetic.

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