Endings and Beginnings
Beginnings and Endings is part of a long term photographic project that reflects on questions of home, grief and memory through the transformation of Cairo after the 2011 revolution; living through a decade in which hope, belonging, and the meaning of home have been repeatedly shaken, broken, and transformed.
I began photographing from a deeply personal place, the fear of losing the places that formed me and no longer knowing where I belonged. For years, I have watched Cairo change before my eyes. Familiar streets became unrecognizable, places I had known all my life disappeared, and the city I carried in my memory began to feel increasingly distant from the one I was living in.
At the same time, my own life was changing in ways I could not always make sense of. People I loved were leaving, relationships were ending, and certain parts of my life were slowly becoming memories. I began to feel that the changes happening around me were somehow mirroring the changes happening within me. Sometimes I could no longer tell whether I was grieving the city itself or the life I once had inside it.
Slowly Cairo began to feel like a place of departure. Her streets became fragments of memory, like the lingering presence of a lost love or someone who has died. For us, these are not just abstract realities. They live in the body. They shape how we love, how we remember, how we move through the world.
I found myself returning to certain places looking for something, perhaps a feeling, a memory, or a version of myself that I could no longer reach. The city felt both there and not there. I wasn’t only grieving the physical changes, but also the versions of myself that existed within it. Endings and beginnings began to blur into one another, colliding in a storm of grief, rage, and love. I came to understand that this rage is born from that very love and this love has nowhere to go. It lingers in the air, impossible to ignore, refusing to fade no matter how much we wish it would.
Through this work, I have been trying to understand what it means to live with change, to accept that some things can never return, and to find a way of loving a place that no longer feels entirely the same.
This chapter of the project is less about closure and more about learning to exist with what is left.
The past cannot be restored.
Something has ended. Yet the bond with this place does not disappear.
The Project was supported by Magnum Foundation and AFAC Arab fund for Arts and Culture.
