I’m in Cairo, again. I started coming back to the city regularly a few years ago, after nearly a decade away, and quickly fell in love with it. It resembles my fractured memory of Khartoum, its neighbour capital city. Everything from the chaotic high streets and markets, the polluted air, and a layer of dust like a film over the cityscape. The city’s paradoxical nature really caught my attention this time, it’s fast paced yet slow at the same time. I first noticed this when documenting the seating that accompanied every pavement, storefront and street corner. Someone is always sitting, gisting, crafting typically over a hot drink (while they wait for a customer to fall into their crosshairs). It’s an act of rest, a conscious one because it requires effort to make space, I’ll explain.
Informal and self-built urban furnitures (see Folk Architecture) haunt the streets. Frankenstein-esque stools, chairs and tables made from scrap wood and metal, cement blocks and discarded furniture. These self-designed seats emerge from their environment, lacking authorship, seats are erected from half-dead materials into vernacular sculptures that serve as social hubs for locals. (While I sit here and glorify this phenomenon it is simply a part of someone’s everyday life. A place to wait outside of their shop in between making a living).
In Zamalek an island on the Nile, you can find people settled in all sorts of spaces people watching from the back of a trucks to either side of monobloc stall holding a glass of tea. What I was observing was what is now fashionably known as the art of doing nothing. Acts that quietly protest the pressure of a capitalistic society that is continuously striving. Waiting often seen as a byproduct of delaying our actions is an action in itself. It’s the how we utilise unused time and often something we want to get rid of. I find that the particularly the self-built urban furniture are what make the long work days that consume the night manageable.
I wonder if the makers of these author-less creations know that with each improvisation they are stitching slowness into pockets of the street. Sanded down logs of wood appended to parapets bound together with merely wire await the conversations and stories of Cairo’s bustling night economy. A nightlife full of streets lit up by shisha spots, cafes and hantours (horse-drawn carts) dressed in obnoxiously coloured lights. The first third of the night is occupied by scenes of intergenerational connection along the Nile Corniche that warm the heart. Gathered around benches and vehicles is another moment of rest, colloquially known as the spotaya. A spotaya typically sees young people use a car as impromptu hangout spots, surrounding it with doors open and music playing. The concept is hardly novel however the informal parking rules make spotayas a sensible option for Egyptian youth spending their night in between functions.
To paraphrase Marina Tabassum – the architect selected to design this year’s Serpentine pavilion, aptly named A Capsule in Time – asks herself “how can I anticipate the chaos of the land I’m building on” so that she not working against the urban current of a place.
A Capsule in Time was designed to be a place of pause, where we can collect memories and spend time collectively with access to anyone outside of one of London’s most prestigious art institutions.
Cairo’s residents have woven waiting into society. Available street seating and nightly opening hours welcome you to sit and bend time to your will. Time is not simply discarded—it is accumulated, and well spent.
I think about how creative drivers are with their car horns, using them in traffic to alert and usher other drivers (practically replacing road markings) or even celebrate newly weds.
It’s an urban landscape that can be moulded into whatever is required by its users. The organised chaos becomes a chain reaction, set in motion by the drivers, pedestrians, and families interacting with urban forces.
Here, the people shape their own architecture—ultimately shaping their own time.