WHEN THE ARCHIVE IS SPECULATIVE,
FATIGUE WITH VISUALIZING THE FUTURE MAY FADE

CURATED BY ALI HUSSEIN ALADAWY

حينما يأتي الأرشيف كخيال,ربما يتبدد عناء تصور المستقبل

“The future has not been canceled. The future is where we will live and grow, but first we need to catch up to the present.”

“Imagine a team of African archaeologists from the future—some silicon, some carbon, some wet, some dry—excavating a site, a museum from their past: a museum whose ruined documents and leaking discs are identifiable as belonging to our present, the early twenty-first century. Sifting patiently through the rubble, our archaeologists from the United States of Africa, the USAF, would be struck by how much Afrodiasporic subjectivity in the twentieth century constituted itself through the cultural project of recovery. In their Age of Total Recall, memory is never lost. Only the art of forgetting. Imagine them reconstructing the conceptual framework of our cultural moment from those fragments. What are the parameters of that moment, the edge of that framework?”

In this project, we imagine and work with a group of futurologists who try to escape ready-made designs produced by and for a trend-factory, in order to draw futures based on speculative/archives instead. This project is understood as a major epistemic and aesthetic intervention, through three commissions: a text, a short video, and a DJ set concert. These three commissions aim to stimulate discussion and debate, in order to question and dismantle authoritarian histories of the postcolonial state in the Egyptian context, as part of an African neighborhood.

The video ‘I Almost Forgot The Roving Body...Let's Call It The Future’ by Mohamed AbdelKarim was screened at the Goethe-Institut Alexandria on the 29 September 2021 and is available to view online (below); the concert was performed by DJ El Kontessa and took place live in Alexandria on the 27th October 2021; and the essay titled سمعنا من الواردين “We heard from those who came before us” by Haitham Shater is accessible in Arabic and English at Archiveofforgetfulness.com.

PART 1

I ALMOST FORGOT THE ROVING BODY...LET’S CALL IT THE FUTURE

Video, 7 minute
Screened at Goethe-Institut Alexandria 29 September 2021
by Mohamed AbdelKarim

A commissioned video on the disappearance of the Mediterranean

How could we imagine / map / build a potential world without the Mediterranean, which goes beyond modern and contemporary histories of colonial / postcolonial-national imaginaries? How might we problematize utopian/dystopian easy speculations that often forget to navigate immigration and ecological questions from the shores of planetary unfair division of labor, as situated within a socioeconomic / political / technological complex?

Image courtesy of
Mohamed AbdelKarim

PART 2

CONCERT DJ SET

27 October 2021
by DJ El Kontessa
27 October 2021 at Goethe-Institut Alexandria.

PART 3

WE HEARD FROM THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE US

by Haitham Shater
Translated by Katharine Halls

MUHAMMAD ALI

The ʿulamaʾ of al-Azhar in Cairo declared Muhammad ʿAli the Pasha governor of Egypt on the 12th May 1805. Alexandria had been in decline in the late eighteenth century. With a population of approximately 6,000, its unpaved streets were filthy and chaotic and its residential buildings insalubrious. At night, city-dwellers had to carry a lantern and a stick to stay safe from harm. When Chateaubriand visited the city in 1806, he wrote that Alexandria was the most wretched place in the world, and one abandoned by its people.

Muhammad ʿAli was a trader and ruler, and Alexandria was a ruined city that bore no traces or memories of previous rulers. It was a city that could be rehabilitated and transformed into the capital of the new governor and a thriving centre of commerce to satisfy the wishes of the former trader. In 1817, the palace of Ras al-Tin was completed: surrounded entirely by water, it was to be the Pasha’s seat and the centrepiece of the city. In 1918, excavations began on a canal which was to connect Alexandria with the western branch of the Nile, 46 miles away. The Mahmudiyya Canal was to provide drinking water to the city and facilitate agricultural activity in the environs. In 1829, construction began on a shipyard for the city, supervised by Louis-Charles Lefèbvre de Cérisy, which was to be the first in a series of stone buildings where the manufacture of shipmasts, rope, and military uniforms would take place. Stones from Alexandria’s classical ruins were used in the shipyard buildings and dry docks. Among those who worked on the modernisation of Alexandria were French, British, Italians, Maltese, Arabs, Turks, Armenians and Copts, alongside women and corvée labourers, most of them Nubian.

NUBIANS

The Muslims who lived along the Nile south of Aswan, especially those in the villages lying between the first and fifth cataracts, or between Aswan and the meeting point of the Nile and the Atbarah, had been known since the Ottoman era as barabira—a word cognate with ‘barbarians.’ The origins of the expression, was adopted by Europeans from the seventeenth century onward, and it is not certain that it referred exclusively to Nubians, since several population groups inhabited the same region, including the Arabic-speaking Shayiqiyya and Jaʿlin, who both claimed Arab descent. The word Nubi—Nubian—first came to be used in the middle ages.

Nubians were not enslaved, other than by coincidence or illegally. Egypt’s 1820-22 Sudan campaign, and the new taxes imposed on the region, led Nubians to migrate northward, particularly to Alexandria, where they could earn a living. Pay was good on Muhammad ʿAli’s modernisation projects in Alexandria, and the city attracted many more Nubian workers than did Cairo, where opportunities were limited. In Cairo, Nubians worked primarily as servants, drivers, camel drovers, and guards for private residencies, commercial premises, and workshops. In Alexandria, by contrast, Nubians acquired several trades while working on the major construction projects, where they came into contact with foreign experts. This enabled them to control these trades for years to come, and the city became a centre of gravity for Nubians, who built anew the city that Chateaubriand had so disliked in the early nineteenth century.

ACCLIMATISATION

By the time of Muhammad ʿAli’s death in 1849, Alexandria’s population had risen from 6,000 to 100,000, most of whom were Nubian migrants from the south. Early in their migration to the city, Nubians suffered greatly from two main problems: understanding the Arabic language, and the absorption of Islam in the form it took in the southern regions where they originated. Numerous anecdotes recount the process of acclimatisation. For example, one tells of an elderly man who was asked about his first hajj pilgrimage. He responded, “Hajj? Zahma wirtibi, horribly crowded. It was hell, may the Lord never make you see the like of it!” Another tells of an elderly lady, who never interrupted her prayers except in two cases. One was if she glimpsed her granddaughter opening the food cupboard without permission, upon which her recitation of Surat al-ʿAsr would take an unusual turn: “Surely humanity is in grave loss, shut that cupboard and may a scorpion sting you, except those who have faith, do righteous deeds, and urge each other to the truth, and urge each other to perseverance.” The second was if a visitor asked after her husband, whose name was Bahr, to which she would reply: “All praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds, the Most Compassionate, Most Merciful, Bahr aj mano—Bahr isn’t here yet—Master of the Day of Judgment…”

A man called Bashir insisted on leading prayers at a nearby mosque. This led him to memorise some of the shorter surahs of the Qur’an, with great difficulty, and he was obliged to translate certain sections which he found difficult to pronounce. When he recited Surat al-al-Ikhlas, he would begin “Say, ‘He is Allah, who is One,’” then stop, unable to pronounce lam yalid wa-lam yulad, and replace it with the Nubian for “he neither begets nor is born.” He also had a regular habit of saying out loud, before beginning each prayer, “I intend to perform the noon prayer” or “the afternoon prayer,” and so on. But he could never remember the word maghrib, and would falter, repeating the words “I intend to perform the— to perform the—” until one of the faithful behind him would prompt him. “God-damned maghrib!” Bashir would reply.

KURUM MADID IN SIDI BISHR IN DECEMBER

On sorrowful winter nights, the sweet pudding called karum madid, which Nubians brought with them from beyond the dam, was a treat after a day at work. Ground fenugreek warmed in butter, with water and flour added, gave a thick consistency; served hot, the pudding warmed the heart and stomach. Foreigners in the coastal city who tried it enjoyed the taste and the winter ritual that accompanied it. In the Bahri neighbourhood was the “street of the two cafés,” a street running perpendicular to the sea with a café on each corner and a famous falafel shop called Abu Sami halfway down; next to that was Nizami’s shop. Nizami was the first person to produce karum madid commercially, and it is a well-known Alexandrian tradition on the first day of Eid al-Fitr to break one’s fast on falafel from Abu Sami then eat dessert at Nizami’s.

Every residential neighbourhood in Alexandria has its favourite beach. People walk in a straight line north from their homes until they reach the sea, and the place they find becomes their historical beach. Stanley beach belongs to the neighbourhoods of Al-Zahiriyya and Hagar al-Nawatiyya, Glym to Bakos and Ghubrial, Miami to Sidi Bishr, and so on. A trip to the beach involved hard work, since you had to carry your umbrella, blanket, and cooler, deckchairs for the older members of the family, and a picnic. How could you carry all that on public transport to get to a beach a long way from where you lived? It would spoil the fun of the seaside, which had already been partly spoiled by the aforementioned tasks.

On the seafront at Sidi Bishr, in front of the Automobile Club, was Karum Madid Kushtamna, the first to come up with the idea of serving karum madid frozen. A family from the village of Kushtamna had decided to modify the traditional warm dish by serving it frozen inside a wafer cone dipped in coconut. The dessert gained widespread popularity, especially among young people, and instead of the trip to Nizami’s in Bahri to eat warm karum madid from small glass bowls, the ritual of choice became a journey east to Sidi Bishr to eat the frozen version inside crisp wafers.

The old karum madid shops, like Makram, ʿIzza and al-Saʿidi, were mostly located in Bahri, and were always named after families or individuals. Kushtamna bucked trends of name and place, and under popular pressure, the old-time shops began to serve the new, cold, version alongside the traditional warm one. With time, the warm dish disappeared and was replaced in most shops by frozen karum madid—except at Nizami, who continued to serve the traditional warm dish. Nizami versus Kushtamna.

NUBIANS ON THE RADIO

Nubian songs are thought to be based originally on improvisation. A singer, also known as a shar, who leads the singing at weddings and other social events, recites lyrics in time to one of the established Nubian rhythmic patterns. Each singer or shar is free to add additional lines to the poems, giving birth to epic songs made up of an infinite number of couplets. Nubian songs follow the division of the language itself into two main dialects, Fadicca and Mattokki.

A small number of instruments are used to accompany songs, including percussion instruments, primarily the tar and the daf, and a stringed instrument called the tambur.

Migration to distant cities changed the form of Nubian songs. One way Nubians attempted to break their isolation in the new cities was by adopting the melodies of popular songs and replacing their lyrics with Nubian words. Whenever a city dweller heard a familiar melody with strange words, they would turn to their Nubian neighbour who would in turn translate the second half of the song. The process would continue with endless variations and combinations. Nubian melodies with Arabic words appeared, as did Arabic melodies with Nubian words and oriental melodies with Arabic lyrics sung by Nubians.

The first migrants to Alexandria were the Mattokki Nubians, who began to share and mix their music and songs with the city’s other residents. As a result, we now find an infinite heritage of quarter-tone and oriental music in Mattokki songs.

The first music of this style to become well known was recorded by the artist ʿIzz al-Din from the village of Gharb Suhayl. His songs were broadcast on the programme “Inspired by the South” on Radio Alexandria, a programme aimed at the Nubians of Alexandria, before the Nubians were able to establish their own radio station under the name “We are Nubia,” a radio station aimed primarily at the Nubians of Alexandria based in the Zahiriyya area where the largest concentration of Nubians in the city lived.

If ʿIzz al-Din was the official story of Nubian singing in the city, Al-Bahr Abu Graysha was the popular one.

Al-Bahr Abu Graysha spent years performing as a singer at weddings and casinos along Alexandria’s seafront promenade before releasing his first cassette tape entitled Kifaya Biʿad (“No More Distance.”). The legendary Ahmad Adawiyya’s cassette “The Sultan’s Daughter” was released at the same time, but according to Al-Akhbar newspaper, it was Kifaya Biʿad that topped sales in the Egyptian market, and Abu Graysha reached the height of his career just after turning forty.

In his memoirs Dreams of the Beast, historian Talal ʿAfifi recalls of Bahr Abu Graysha:

"He got off the boat every few months and came straight to us from the port, tall and broad. He walked all the way from the port to the alleyways of Bakos, singing as he went... The women would fling open their windows to look at him, calling ‘There’s no one in Alexandria with a voice like yours!,’ until he got to the wedding where he was due to sing. He’d leap up onto the stage, singing and dancing, with a million percussionists behind him, from all over the city, from Bahri to Abu Qir. And then, God rest his soul, he’d start undoing the buttons of his white navy shirt until he threw it off altogether, until all he was wearing only his trousers and undershirt, excuse my French. He’d pull a red handkerchief out of his pocket, wave it in the air and tie it around his neck, just like they do in Latin America! People would forget their worries and be happy.”

Al-Bahr Abu Graysha represented the proud image of a migrant from the south, one that identified with the new city while also creating something that linked the north with the south.

Fadicca Nubians migrated to the city after the Mattokki. The story goes that when they first discovered the new mixing of Nubian and oriental singing, they strongly disapproved, and as a result maintained a serious adherence to the traditional Nubian song form for a long period of time.

At a time when Mattokki singing dominated mainstream media in the city, the Faddica withdrew to the margins to make their own exquisite folk music. Only heard at private gatherings and weddings, it was a form of ethnic music-making that did not go beyond its tribal context. For weddings and parties, singers would be brought from Nubian villages in Aswan, and what few attempts were made to form local ensembles did not succeed due to the limited demand for entertainment in the Faddica dialect. There was a deeply-held conviction that true authenticity could only exist in the south, because these attempts failed due to low turnout and demand. Could someone who brought a singer from Aswan to celebrate his daughter’s wedding be compared with someone who brought a singer from a nearby neighbourhood? Alexandria became a technical centre where Faddica artists came to record their songs and make cassettes, boasting an extensive market in which they could promote their music. Yet the creation of the songs themselves, in terms of lyrics and melodies, took place in the old villages prior to the displacement of the Nubians, and in the new villages north of Aswan following their displacement.

NOBLE GRIEF
During World War II, many Germans gained weight. Eating in huge quantities as a result of exposure to the shock or fear of death or injury led to a form of obesity known as kummerspeck (“sorrow fat”).

The women of the villages of Kushtamna, al-Siyala, al-Dikka, al-Alaqi, and all the villages with strange beautiful names in old Nubia are known for what is known as the shugga, a white robe that women wrap in a characteristic fashion over their house galabiyya when they go outside. Women who migrated to Alexandria continued to wear the shugga, and in the early days they would apparently replace the white robe with a black one in grief over their separation from their homes. Over the years, the shugga became the uniform of women in Alexandria, and became known as the milayat laff or “wrap sheet,” a description that replaced the original Nubian name.

It is said that the migration of Nubians to the canal cities during the construction of the Suez Canal led to the emergence of an instrument called the simsimiyya. The tambur was transformed into the simsimiyya in the canal cities just as the white shugga became the black wrap that oozed Alexandrian femininity and coquetry.

THE BALLANA RAILWAY CROSSING

Early on in their migration to Alexandria, Nubians gathered together with the city’s other residents in populated areas such as Bahri, Karmuz, al-ʿAttarin and Kom al-Dikka. With the construction of the railway and the emergence of a train connecting these areas to the city, groups hailing from specific villages old Nubia each chose to settle in a given area along the railway, thus reviving the idea of their village, with the metal rail track replacing the river bank. People from the village of Dabud, one of the largest and most densely populated Nubian villages, gathered at the al-Zahiriya station, which explains why al-Zahiriya became the real centre of the city—so much so that the al-Zahiriya Youth Centre was the first Alexandrian club in the Egyptian Football League. A number of famous players played for the team, including the defender Ahmed Saleh who scored two goals in the cup final against Zamalek in 1963. Sports critic Naguib ElMestekawy referred to his playing style as "the advanced Ahmed Saleh technique.” The Al-Zahiriya Youth Center Fans Association famously chanted the slogan “Daboud of Hope”—which no other football fans would understand—whenever the team faced a critical moment.

Bakos was inhabited by those coming from the village of Emberkab, whose nickname was “Boom Bullets” in reference to shooting, a name which suggests a certain danger that captures the nature of the Emberkab people. Today, if Bakos and its surrounding areas still exist as places, then they’re not going to do us much good, my friend.

Al-Raml al-Miri became the converging point for the people of al-Dikka, a village known as Dikka Dowol which meant “the large bench.” When the railway authorities renovated the al-Raml Al-Miri train station, they made the station excessively large, with wide platforms and wide stairs, which seemed disproportionate for a station not frequented by many passengers—but perhaps it was out of loyalty, a memento of the large bench.

Sidi Bishr was settled by people from the village of Dahmit. Dahmit was known as the “Sun of Nubia” due to the high academic achievements of villagers in comparison to other Nubians. Sidi Bishr was home to some outstanding schools, such as the ʿAli Ibn Abi Talib Preparatory School, which always produced the top-scoring student in the governorate, and the al-Jazzar Institute, a centre for private tutoring which was the city’s most famous and expensive. Sidi Bishr was and will always remain the sun of Alexandria.

The people of the village of Ballana settled near Victoria Station. Ramshackle old pickup trucks would line up alongside the Victoria railway tracks, now known as the Ballana Crossing, with benches placed in the truck bed and a tarpaulin placed over the top to shield from the sun and rain. This primitive means of transportation was called kabut, and would transport passengers to Mustafa Kamil Street. Mustafa Kamil Street runs parallel to the railway line, and, near its end, takes a bend to go back and meet the railway again at the Islah Station, or Firyal Station as it was once known.

When the Nubians began to settle on lands next to the railway, the Mattokkians settled in an area starting from the beginning of the line at Cairo Station, while the Fadicca settled at the end of the line, at Abu Qir Station, and all the way to Islah Station, heading south along Mustafa Kamil Street. The Ballana Crossings, formerly known as Victoria, eventually became the meeting point between the Fadicca and the Mattokkia.

Tradition tells the tale of an old woman who rode a kabut cart from Ballana Crossing to Firyal Station on New Year’s Eve, carrying in her hand a calendar for new year, who handed out mint candy to the other passengers in the kabut, asking in a worried voice, “When can I use the new calendar? And how often do I have to tear a page out of it??”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Philip Mansel, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean

Carole Counihan, The Anthropology of Food and Body

Terence Walz and Kenneth M.Cuno, Race and Slavery in the Middle East:Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth Century Egypt,  Sudan, and Ottoman Mediterranean
Harry Collins, Are we all scientific experts now?

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ABOUT THE CURATOR

Ali Hussein al-Adawy is a curator, researcher, editor, writer and critic of moving images, urban artistic practices, and cultural history. He has curated several film programmes and seminars such as Serge Daney: A homage and retrospective (2017) and Harun Farocki: Dialectics of images…Images that cover/uncover other images (2018). He also curated, together with Paul Cata, the exhibition The Art of Getting Lost in Cities: Barcelona & Alexandria (2017). He was one of the founders of Tripod, an online magazine for film and moving images criticism (2015-2017) and was part of the editorial team of TarAlbahr, an online platform and a publication for urban and art practices in Alexandria (2015-2018).

︎: @ali.aladawy85

____________________________

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Mohamed Abdelkarim
Mohamed Abdelkarim’s (El Minya, 1983) practice is performance-oriented. He considers performance as a research method and a practice through which he produces texts and images that embody the forms of poetry, scripts, sound, and video. Employing and reflecting on different performative acts like narrating, singing, dancing, detecting, and doing, his work is concerned with the performance of renegades in a time of crisis, complicating the relationship between geography and the fugitive. His performances have been included in Guild Master of Cabaret Voltaire Manifesta11, Zurich, 2016; Sofia Underground Performance Art Festival, Bulgaria, 2016; Live Works Performance Act Award Vol.5, 37°EDIZIONE DRODESERA, Italy, 2017. As part of his performative practice, he established „Live Praxes“ - a performative project that brings together lectures, debates, readings, critical responses, and creative quests, alongside organizing performance nights. Abdelkarim currently lives and works in Cairo.

In his commissioned video “I Almost Forgot The Roving Body...Let's Call It The Future” (7 mins/ 2021) Mohamed Abdelkarim speculates on the disappearance of the Mediterranean. He asks: How could we imagine/map/build a potential world without the Mediterranean, which goes beyond modern and contemporary histories of colonial / postcolonial-national imaginaries? How might we problematize utopian/dystopian easy speculations that often forget to navigate immigration and ecological questions from the shores of planetary unfair division of labor, as situated within a socioeconomic / political / technological complex?

︎: @abdelkarim.mhmd 
︎: @m_abdel_karim

El Kontessa
El Kontessa is a Cairo-based DJ who mixes mainly Egyptian Mahraganat music, as well as experimenting with different electronic beats. In the set performed in Alexandria on the 27th October 2021, DJ ElKontessa plays with the fictional archives of the various encounters in outer space of Sun Ra+Salah Ragab+AlBahr AbuGrisha.

︎: @elkontessa_
︎: @El_Kontessa

Haitham Shater
Haitham Shater is an engineer and writer interested in exploring the multiple histories of the city, as well as the veiled-face lady from Koshtamna village, except for the elevator rest time, when he gets busy blogging. In his essay, “We heard from those who came before us”, Haitham Shater imagines Alexandria as a city with a Nubian majority population since 1915.

︎: @haithamshater