“You’re a traveling stranger. I’m a stranger who never traveled.” (Rami, street poet in Cairo)
Sound installation for the Cairoscape exhibition, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien 2008
Street sellers and workers, car horns, prayers calls, coffee shop conversations, whistles, music tapes, mobile phones, car alarms, lost dogs and wild birds colonies: The Cairo soundscape is a sleepless conversation. It reveals a constellation of social power and tensions where each loud utterance is a possible address and a call at the same time, where each voice is a body supplement to grasp more space or at least to signalize and thus fighting for a presence. Having a voice is the condition to survive in the over-crowded megacity.
Magdi Mustafa, a sound artist met at the Townhouse Gallery, describes how listening to low frequency sounds like airplanes flying over Cairo puts him in a meditative state of mind and makes him think about the past. Having never flown before, he wonders if passengers have similar sensations and memories while flying.
Profound listening, an immersion in the inside of sound matter, offers an alternative way to travel in space and time without problematic border crossing for those who are not part of the transnational traveling elite. For the installation Outside of the Plane, I have created a listening environment using recordings of Magdi’s voice, fragments of Cairo soundscapes and the exhibition room itself as a resonator for low frequency sounds.
