For its third and largest edition, the self-proclaimed fastest-growing design week in the region set out to transform Cairo into an “open-air design playground.” Its ambition took physical form: oversized see-saws at the entrance of the Islamic Ceramics Museum, an immersive sensory room on Zamalek’s 26 of July Street and mirrors with a Khalil Gibran quote stickered on them that felt lifted out of a therapy session, reminding you to “forget not that the Earth delights to feel your bare feet.”
A spectacle promising grounding and play in a suspended city.
Suspension is an essential term in my lexicon, one I keep returning to as I meditate on Cairo’s urban fabric and my place within it. Suspension, to me, conjures the absence of embodied perception, which indexes a profoundly different state. Embodied perception is the return to the body during moments of mental overstimulation. The visceral reactions that guide decision-making; the state of flow. Joy. Tapping into the less rational sides of one’s being.
Since moving back to Cairo, I have been interested in suspension in the spatial, moral and political sense: a way of moving through the world without being in it, a dislocation from place. A passerby drops a Molto wrapper on the ground without a second thought — a detachment from place, self and ethics. Spatial suspension is a dislocation from responsibility and material reality.
Suspension here is a personal and collective mode of surviving a city that overwhelms, the product of a long-standing separation between citizens and the infrastructures meant to hold them. It is a form of anesthetizing the senses to keep moving. The Molto wrapper is a microscale example of suspended living — there is no intention behind the act, laying bare the everyday erosion of responsibility and normalization of non-relation to place.
Cairo Design Week meticulously positions itself within this non-relation to place, turning it into a ticketed spectacle, for profit. Much like the compound advertisements lining Cairo’s highways, the Week treats design as advertisements treat lifestyle: as an oil painting. Curated by Egypt’s brand-fixated creative industry and catered to a suspended audience. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a rudder here. The oil painting, Berger argues, is proof of wealth, ownership and culture. In the context of the Week, design becomes an articulation of the idea that “you are what you have.” On the receiving end, there is an audience performing a version of cultural fluency conducive to cultural capital.
Where has embodied intelligence gone?
Design, as I know it, is embodied intelligence: intelligent form arising from intention shaped by a spatial and material awareness. Designer Paul Rand’s definition of design as a method of putting form and content together also resonates. What differentiates design from art is the inherent value or intention embedded within form, which art does not require. When form and content cohere, design can be imbued with political, historical and cultural relevance. Think the mashrabiyya, a staple of historic Cairo’s windows, where design and geometry are intentionally employed to address privacy norms, gendered spatial practices and climatic factors. Or Coptic weaving, a marrying of material intelligence with formal systems of craft, functional integration and cultural symbolism. Coherence of form and content require embodiment during making. This is because embodied knowledge (the visceral reaction to a material, gesture or idea) relates to a primordial Knowing that links to a universal Being, which allows us to experience design (and art) collectively. Hollow form, therefore, is one that has lost its grounding in the material, historical and sensorial intelligence, informed by embodiment.
As with art, a designer’s embodied presence is paramount; without it, the audience’s capacity for critical evaluation, creative insight and appreciation of materiality becomes obsolete. Suspension (detachment from one’s embodiedness) yields design that is sanitized, depoliticized and severed from its own viscerality. This fractures the connection between form and content. And so I ask: how can design be consumed meaningfully when embodied presence is suspended in both the producer and the consumer? Cairo Design Week’s focus on sensory rooms and curated tactility mimics embodiment, rather than nurturing the infrastructures and ecosystems that might actually produce it.
“Design so I can see you.”
This is the Week’s slogan. If design demands seeing, then how one sees and who is seeing merit attention. Berger’s insistence that “what you see is relative to your position in the world,” accompanied me through each venue. Seeing is conditioned by class, geography and access.
Berger writes that we transform our lives by buying things; that we believe that we become richer through possession, even as we become poorer for having spent the money. Glamour, he writes, is “the state of being envied” invoked by seeing. I thought of glamour as I entered Heliopolis’ Cayan Court. What does it mean to place one foot after the other, traversing a red carpet that stretches from the dirt on Cairo’s streets to the curated haven formed by Ebb & Flow Studios, Hanimex, Point Carpet, Esorus, and, at center-stage, Valu Café? What do the names even mean? Glamour, according to Berger, is the promise of transformation and an invitation to become enviable.
Publicity depends on ideals of selfhood imposed by glamour. Publicity also caters to a suspended viewer who may be mobilized by images of what is absent. In this way, the Week helps reshape what it means to want and consume in the context of Cairo.
Berger then notes that “soon after we see, we become aware that we can also be seen — the eye of the other combines with our own, making it entirely credible that we are part of the visible world.” Cairo Design Week fetishizes seeing as such. At each venue, English-speaking guides welcome an expensively dressed audience eager to be seen as belonging. Some of this audience is part of a growing class residing in gated compounds on Cairo’s peripheries, engaging with the city’s core only in episodes. I remember moving through crowds huddled for pictures in front of the self-proclaimed sculptural installations scattered around the Aicha Fahmy Palace’s exterior, the reimagined pearl pavilion and Dr. Greiche’s When the Nile Takes Shape, amongst other design artifacts. They are scenes of image-making and the act of seeing amongst a suspended population.
Same, same, same
I dropped by Heliopolis’ venues on Friday morning. By the time I reached Villa Magenta, I had already encountered the same curvilinear couch five times, each accompanied by a poetic, algorithmic wall text about mindfulness and craftsmanship. Going through the villa’s ground floor, my mind felt oversaturated with sameness, and I needed to leave. I had a funny exchange with a guide as I was going: How did you find it? It’s all the same. She laughs. Did you visit the bathroom? Yes, it’s lovely. But you must visit the upper floor, I promise it’s different. What is different about it? It comprises two very different uses of material. Oh? Yes, one uses leather and the other marble. I go upstairs. What caught my attention was a little GPT-generated poem on the wall next to the leather section titled Forms of devotion, where “visitors are invited to witness, reflect, and respond to one question: what is your spirit devoted to?” I rush back downstairs.
So, how did you find it? It’s all the same.
Sameness is an inevitable byproduct of suspended cities: form detached from content, images detached from materiality, and, back to the highway advertisements, publicity detached from lived context. For Berger, sameness is the aesthetic of absence: absence of craft, rootedness and embodied perception. Cairo Design Week amplifies this absence, curating a spectacular uniformity that values visibility instead of meaning. The Week cultivates conditions in which form is fetishized and content is emulated; sameness proliferates.
I left the venue and walked towards another. I racked my brain on how differences in creative outputs are perceived in suspension. How was the leather section different from that of the marble? Sameness here is the reproduction of images detached from material, place and labour, rather than a lack of originality. It is what happens when design becomes image-based publicity. Design as forms that repeat themselves endlessly. Suspension produces sameness because nothing can differentiate itself. When perception is suspended, everything looks the same because everything is seen the same way. Sameness, is, in this sense, a conjuring of absence, where images substitute the social, material and historical grounding that would otherwise differentiate things.
CDW and its afterlives
Though still costly for most of the city’s population, Cairo Design Week offers access to an experience of design and spectacle that might otherwise be out of reach for a substantial portion of the public. In a society disengaged from the materiality of creation, I wonder about the afterlife of this access. Berger describes publicity as the engine of consumer society, an entity that propagates through images a society’s belief in itself. Publicity acts upon those who constitute the market. If the audience constituting the market lacks the embodied awareness that nurtures critical engagement, art and design become commodities rather than objects that can bring about social change or innovation. In a society where seeing is restricted and privileged, where access is governed by premeditated and highly curated tastes and aesthetics, can nuanced creation prosper?
On Sunday, I took a visiting friend on a walk from the Nile’s bank to Khan al-Khalili, passing through souqs, workshops and craftspeople, in areas that I would not traverse myself as a resident of Cairo. We stumbled across a knife-sharpening workshop that has been operating for over a hundred years. Two men, lovingly holding knives they were shaping, were telling us about their craft. My friend, who lives in Switzerland, remarked that their knives could rival the Swiss Army Knife. Farther along, we encountered a drop forger shaping jewelry. Craft felt scarce, nevertheless. The living culture of making feels fragile. As the sun began to set, we wrapped up our tour of old Cairo, exiting through Ataba. Aisles of plastic goods, made-in-China imports and amorphous “design” pieces catered to lower-income residents. On our way downtown, we dropped by Kodak Court, one of Cairo Design Week’s venues. Over and over, I kept thinking about the fragility of craft in Cairo and the Week’s abstraction of the lived city. I kept thinking of the suspension that yields the apathy with which the city’s inhabitants engage with craft.
The absurdity of Cairo Design Week starts to sink in. Design is embodied intelligence. Design needs the legitimacy and discourse of art, its critical apparatus, and the prestige of display and curation, which Design Week facilitates. But what is design when embodiment is factored out? What is design’s afterlife when experienced by a suspended audience? Rather than interrupting it, Cairo Design Week aestheticizes suspension, staging the systems instead of engaging the conditions that produce them. The challenge of nurturing creative practice in Cairo is to reclaim embodied seeing, to render the city a contested and productive space rather than a sanitized parade-ground.
What remains is the challenge of cultivating conditions under which embodied perception can return.
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