Mohamed Elshahed - Urban Trend: Protest
Mohamed Elshahed
Cairo, Egypt
Urban Trend: Protest
Revolution Museum, 2013
3 min., 29 sec.
Learn more about Protest on 100urbantrends.org: http://www.bmwguggenheimlab.org/100ur...
This video was commissioned as part of Participatory City: 100 Urban Trends from the BMW Guggenheim Lab, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from October 11, 2013 - Jan 5, 2014. Learn more at http://www.guggenheim.org/100urbantrends.
Bio:
Mohamed Elshahed is a Cairo-based scholar and researcher currently completing his doctoral dissertation in the Middle East studies department at New York University. His dissertation, Revolutionary Modernism? Architecture and the Politics of Transition in Egypt, 1936--1967, focuses on architecture and urban planning in Egypt during the period of political transition around the coup d'etat of 1952. Elshahed earned a B.Arch. from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and an MA in architecture studies from MIT.
Statement:
Cairo has a long history of protests that are now being documented in a unique way. The Revolution Museum was a temporary structure built of wooden supports and plastic sheets that appeared multiple times at the epicenter of Tahrir Square, the site of many protests since 2011. It was a conscious response by anonymous protesters to record history as it was happening. Protesters created this space where messages, sentiments, objects, and images from the protests could be kept and displayed as a record of the unfolding events and factual evidence of the protests, which are often excluded from official narratives written after the fact. The Revolution Museum was removed when the square was cleared by force in 2011.
When Egypt went through a major moment of transition in 1952 during the coup d'état of that year, the role of protesters was dismissed in the ruling regime's official narrative, which was constructed later. A 1953 magazine article asked, "Where is the people's share in the revolution museum?" Tahrir Square's Revolution Museum was a spatial manifestation of the Egyptian protesters' desire to enact change and claim their right to history.