Beginnings and Endings
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. Since the revolution, I have watched Cairo change before my eyes. Increasingly restrictive political and social conditions, entire landscapes shifting, historic places demolished, and the city reshaped by relentless construction. People started leaving the country in search of more “freedom”, “safety”, or a future they could still believe in. 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.
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. that rage is born from that very love and this love has nowhere to go now. It lingers in the air, impossible to ignore, refusing to fade no matter how much we wish it would.
The Project is supported by Magnum Foundation and AFAC Arab fund for Arts and Culture.
