Punlished recently: When Egypt Repressed and Censored Arts and Culture | Essay | Zócalo Public Square
A few months after the January 25 revolution of 2011, a collective of Egyptian artists organized a three-day workshop focused on art in times of historical change. The two-year period between the revolution and the 2013 military coup gave us the illusion that the future belonged to us.
The workshop took place at the Jesuit Cultural Center in Alexandria. What remains is a single morning: Breakfast with philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi at the hotel. The Mediterranean lay open beyond the window, serene, almost detached. Behind us, television screens showed army tanks pulling back from Tahrir Square—a tactical retreat in the endless fluctuation over who would command the square. The sea held its line. The square did not.
We asked not how to resist, but how to build the present and future, what role art could play in such a moment, and how a wounded country like ours might negotiate its place inside the vast machinery of empire. We were thinking vastly, invigorated by a new hope! That, at the time, felt like proof we were winning.
Only later did I understand that Bifo and I were taking comfort in a fragile illusion: the apparent stability of the global order—its thin, peaceful façade. We wanted so badly to believe that time could not move backward—that it progressed—that the worst imaginable outcome was a return of the old tyrants. Then the tanks did return, crushing the bodies of Egyptian revolutionaries in the streets. Russia invaded Ukraine. And the rest of the world watched, for two years, as a genocide in Gaza unfolded in plain sight. The stage was set for new monsters to reenter history, dragging the world back with a more brutal logic.
Before the revolution, the Egyptian art scene survived through a patchwork economy. The state, through its Ministry of Culture, remained the primary patron with its paternalistic and vigilant bureaucracy. European cultural centers and Egyptian NGOs, themselves dependent on European Union funding, framed art as a tool of social development and served as a soft microphone for European political agendas. They often nudged artists from the Global South toward producing work that condemned “immigration” and “immigrants,” even as many of these artists dreamed of immigrating. At the margins existed a thinner, more fragile ecology: collective spaces founded and sustained by artists themselves, financed by day jobs, favors, and exhaustion. …. Read the full piece: When Egypt Repressed and Censored Arts and Culture | Essay | Zócalo Public Square
Leave a Reply