Mahdy’s Walk

I asked Mahdy Saad, a youth living in Ard El Lewa (an informal area in Greater Cairo) to take me on a short walk in his neighborhood. I recorded the conversation we had on the walk, in which Mahdy talked about his relationship to his neighborhood, its rapid growth, football and sunshine. I took the same walk with 20 volunteers from inside and outside Ard El Lewa. 

Mahdy’s Walk is a 20-minute, downloadable audio tour in Ard El Lewa. Download audio to your mobile phone or MP3 player and follow these directions (pdf).

Exhibited at artellewa 23 April 2013 - 5 May 2013.

Testimony

My name is a narrow passage from the village of occupation in the state’s territory. On the day of the invasion, while I was inside the horizon at around 7:30 pm, seeking to compare two conditions, two officers from the General Intelligence prepared my narrative before I crossed the border. 

Text installation in an interrogation room at the former Al-Far’aa Prison, West Bank, Palestine.

Al-Mahatta International Artists Workshop, September 16, 2011.

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The much-ballyhooed demise of geography has proved to be premature. Instead, we use our now-ingrained cyber-intelligence to navigate the rotting urban infrastructures that surround us. Amira Hanafi moves through Chicago’s industrial past the way we surf the web, guided in equal parts by intuition and purpose, resulting in a Cageian writing-through of urbanity. Forgery is an act of purposeful purposelessness, whereupon eons and histories — both cultural and personal — meld into one rich derive of language. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Joining the illustrious company of other poet architects: Michael Ondaatje (In The Skin Of A Lion), Rene Gladman (Event Factory), Walt Disney (Disneyland), and Matthew Sharpe (Jamestown) Amira Hanafi takes us on a walking tour that refabricates the history of a city (Chicago) as a live performance cooling on the window sill to feed hoboes, and enabling them (us) to walk on into the next story. History in Amira Hanafi’s hands is serious and weighty fun. — Eileen Myles

Review by Lily Robert-Foley at AngelHousePress (PDF)

Collaged from language collected using the obscure keyword “Finkl”—obituaries, case histories, old Chicago legends, gossip columns, political speeches and online posts—FORGERY is a lyrical essay on industrial and personal dislocation—a strange choreography of urban conquest and collapse—centered on a 130-year-old Chicago steel forge. Founded in 1879 by German immigrant Anton Finkl, A. Finkl & Sons Co. still operates today on Chicago’s Near North Side. Last vestige of an industrial era, the company produces die forgings noisily and with a good deal of dirty emissions alongside one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods, where spas and plastic surgeons, shops for handmade cosmetics and luxury chocolates extend off one of the busiest commercial corridors in Chicago. Starting from this intersection of forces, the narrator embarks on a walk to the seven forgotten homes of the forge’s founder, on the way meeting settlers, Indians, Bob Fosse and Richard Daley, gangsters, workers, a K-pop girl group, and a cast of other peculiar characters whose fused stories recount the multifarious history of an evolving city. Whether tied up at gunpoint in the garage of a basketball player or floating at the bottom of Lake Michigan, FORGERY revels in disorientation. Printed in an edition of 500 with silk screen covers by Crosshair and an introduction by Stephen Lapthisophon.

Excerpt

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Walk Under the Interstate - Chicago, IL - November 13, 20 & 28, 2010

Images: Perimeters

Cairo On the Length is a project in progress, tapping the imaginations of more than 50 individuals to construct a collective image of Cairo. Over four months, the artist, a citizen of the United States and of Egypt, drifted for 100 hours with 30 different people in Cairo. Photographs from each walk were sent to writers and artists in Chicago; they were asked to make responses. I am working with collected material to assemble a psychogeography of Cairo in book form.

Google map of the project

Excerpt

Eliding the imaginary totalizations of the eye, there is a strangeness in the commonplace that creates no surface, or whose surface is only an advanced limit, an edge cut out of the visible. In this totality, I should like to indicate the processes that are foreign to the ‘geometric’ or ‘geographic’ space of visual, panoptic or theoretical constructions. Such spatial practices refer to a specific form of operations (ways of doing); they reflect ‘another spatiality’ (an anthropological, poetic and mystical spatial experiment); they send us to an opaque, blind domain of the inhabited city, or to a transhuman city, one that insinuates itself into the clear text of the planned, readable city. — Michel de Certeau

transhumancity: observations in Cairo

A catalog of a catalog, an index of an index, Minced English inventories twenty-nine terms for people of mixed race from the Oxford English Dictionary. The book is an archive of language as data as well as a record of obsession.

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Sunday Drifting
Fall 2009: Chicago

1 — the drift occurs on a Sunday 
2 — it has a unique starting point 
3 — it lasts until the last drifter says it’s finished
4 — everyone is welcome

The dérive (literally, drifting) is a technique for hastily passing through varied environments…In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn to the terrain and the encounters they find there. —Guy Debord, Theory of the Dérive

Project website

Maps of the Order of Signs

I moved to Chicago in the summer of 2006. Immediately, I was struck by the abundance of text on the streets. I found myself reading signs aloud as I walked the city attempting to understand its grid; to memorize some of the hundreds of street names & how they intersected; to try to understand some of the city’s qualities, its personalities.

Armitage Avenue runs along the blurry southern edge of Logan Square, disappears for a while over the Chicago River, and then starts up again in Lincoln Park, just past the steel forge, A. Finkl & Sons. I was interested in the differences between the neighborhood I had chosen to live in and one that juxtaposed, yet was still connected. In October 2006, I decided to do a “close reading” of two one-mile segments of Armitage. I walked east from the Sawyer Avenue intersection just south of my apartment in Logan Square, to Western Avenue; then, another mile from Lincoln Avenue west to Racine. Clutching an audio recorder close to my mouth and concerned with how I was being read by other walkers, I spoke aloud all the text I saw. At home I transcribed these recordings, analyzed and treated the texts in various ways, attempting to make sense of these odd, diverse, nonconforming materials; and perhaps of the city that yielded them.

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