metropolis m

‘It’s a lingering thought that I’ve had for a couple of years now, that was already spurred by a project by Maurizio Cattelan (Oblomov Foundation, 1992), in which he raised prize money for any artist who was willing to not work for a year. Nobody took him up on it, but that idea has been quite intriguing; this notion that we don’t do this for the money, we do this for something else that is much bigger. The idea to stop working is catastrophic — it’s the worst thing that could come to the mind of an artist, that you would be stopped from making work. At the moment, I’m researching all kinds of artists who were incarcerated. They are writing on rolling paper and toilet paper and having artwork, art supplies, smuggled into the prison; they are doing all sorts of impossible things just to continue to work. There’s an impulse to produce. On the other hand, looking at this current climate where freedom of expression is being eroded at a pace we never imagined, it becomes a thought to ponder: would not making art be a more effective kind of resistance given that art has become completely mainstream? There’s always this kind of usurping that happens. On the other hand, how much do artists as a collective contribute through their desire to continue to work? Artists seem to be contributing to a cycle that’s eating them up; that’s eating their effectiveness up. I think art should be proposing an alternative vision for the future. Or at least considering how to do so.’

The inspiration for a work is always the spark of an image — there’s a lucid kind of image that I see. In this case, I saw an image of an old woman sitting in an armchair on a raft in the open sea. Around her domestic objects of varying sizes were floating. This image triggered the script of East of Noon, but also several other pieces of writing. I’m also interested in stories and how they are relayed: passing on a story from one person to the other. What gets kept; what gets left out? What happens to the story when it gets retold? What makes a contemporary story mythical? There was a conversation that influenced me quite a lot when I was working on the script for this film, which is a conversation between John Berger and Susan Sontag about storytelling (“To Tell A Story,” 1983). There’s one notion that John Berger put forward, that it’s the end of a story that makes a story and somehow that ending spurs us to tell it — if there was no special ending, then whatever happened before wouldn’t be of interest to tell. This idea connects completely to the tradition of the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, which I have been reading since I was a child. I was nine years old, when I read all of them — the censored version, of course. This notion of entering into a cycle of one story leading into another in an endless fashion that has always been there and, this structure I also mirrored in my short films and also to an extent in East of Noon. There’s a story within a story.

‘In Arabic it says, something like ‘once upon a time, not a long time ago,’ which is difficult to translate; it’s difficult to imagine. This line posits that even though it’s ‘once upon a time,’ the story isn’t ancient. There’s always an inherent impossibility with ‘once upon a time’ because it kind of asks you to go somewhere you can’t access. I’m interested in a notion put forward by the German archaeologist and Egyptologist Jan Assmann on collective memory and how through passing on stories and histories, a culture also preserves itself. With East of Noon, I wanted to look more at these notions, and at the dissection of storytelling: what are the components of a story and more than anything, what is the value of telling stories. It’s also something that’s said in the film, ‘every story has a hero.’ Sometimes the hero wins, but not always, and even if the hero doesn’t win, then their story has still been written. That goes back to John Berger. That even the attempt to tell the story is heroic. This is something of great value today. That somehow, it’s not all hopeless and somehow, we’re just here to continue to try to thrive.’

‘This is something I’ve been playing with throughout my practice. Very early on, I would take a photograph of a lone person — a wide shot of a single person in different parts of the city, and they were made up as a kind of reenactment to fit their environment. Nothing in this scene would be outwardly different or strange: somebody would be sitting in a café for a drink, for instance. They all looked very normal. But there was something about this existence in this space that was a bit hyperreal because you couldn’t imagine a big city like Cairo where these moments might exist. But they do exist. And I think at that point I was already starting to think that everything around us, if we would look at it in a certain way, has a hyperreal quality. It’s not necessarily the thing in itself, it’s more that it takes you or your disposition to see something magical in it, or something that’s not normal. If we’re in a rush, then we don’t see it. In my mind, this idea of magical realism has to do with taking the time to look. And once we do, then mundanity ceases to be mundane. It could be that even small gestures acquire a different weight. Another thing I’ve always been interested in is escapism, which you would tend to go toward when there’s a certain situation that is hopeless — there’s a notion of imagining an alternative where there is none. I’m interested in that alternative mixed with reality in a seamless way.’

‘When I first started thinking about the story, I wanted it to take place in this enclave. But I couldn’t imagine possibilities for what it could be. One thing that was important was that the place was dry so that there would be a contrast between the enclave and the sea. When we were scouting, we found this disused factory — a furniture factory on the outskirts of Cairo. The industrial backdrop added another dimension to the story because Egypt, like a lot of countries ridding themselves of colonialism in the 1950s and ‘60s, had this big industrial dream and went through a process of heavy state-owned industrialization. But that all collapsed in the ‘80s and most of these factories went into disuse and are now sold for land. This particular factory is 400 metres from the Nile, so destroying it and building high rises with a view is way more profitable than doing something else. It’s waiting for demotion.’

‘There was something I became aware of very early on making films. When audiences are watching something different from their own world, they often assume what they’re watching is real, even if it can’t be verified by their own experiences. This is a quite Western-centric way of looking at the world. The theatre has always been part of my work. I showed my first short film in a large biennial years ago, and there were 100 extras in the film. It was constructed around actors, it was very theatrical and part of it actually took place on a stage, and there were voiceover and music, but not one of those extras spoke. But the curator was treating the work as if it was some kind of documentary. This was kind of baffling to the young me. How should something look to not to be taken as real? What is the value in treating art as news? And so, the theatre has always been part of my work. There are almost always theatre curtains in my work. The idea that there’s a show that’s been put on for your benefit, instead of perhaps this awareness of complex layers to human experience.’

‘Yes, every object is not just an object. And this brings us back to the idea of contemplation or stopping to look at something as an experience. I’m mainly a collector of photographs. I did not set out to create an archive, but I have a kind of archive now. Within a single image there’s all this history preserved. The collector collects in the hope that by preserving these objects they would somehow be of value later. I’m collecting these photographs because I feel these images have value; it’s maybe not visible to the state or to anyone else, so I’m keeping them for now. The artist is doing something similar with ideas: I’m making a film about storytelling because I believe that storytelling is important, and maybe it’s an idea that I want to carry forward to the future. Both the artist and collector resist oblivion; they’re connected.’