projecting; Cairo

The project is oriented in the handcrafts tradition of the Nile-Waters’ context. The essential liquid allows the appearance of the PAPYRUS. It is difficult to believe that this historically relevant icon had disappeared from Egypt until 1962 when scientist Dr. Ragab re-introduced the plant in the Nile and re-discovered the Papyrus’ production technique. This extremely valuable legacy of Egyptian’s culture is an essential contribution to the development of graphical language, hence to the diffusion of scientific and historic knowledge, and literary and philosophical thought.

The COTTON is strongly tightened to Egyptian’s cultural tradition, and so are clothes and fabrics. Cotton and linen are absolutely relevant to Egypt culture and its historical commercial activity. Fabrics’ meanings are conveyed by colours and shapes, and recall to traditional social practice. Each cloth of the layered-dress-code’s purpose is to establish parameters between social and intimate life. There is a curious analogy of linen layered mummification and woman’s layered-dress-code that reminds to a preservation and conservation intention. The idea of old pharaonic body’s preservation for the transit to the new life, comes to terms in the layered-dressed-code, where the women’s body is preserved from public life and conserved for their private life.

‘The Paper-Dress’ fabrics and japanese paper
Photograph by MªJo Ribas

Experimenting with these two historically rooted materials could open their contemporary conceptual understanding. I propose a project conceived as a communicative canvas, a place where tradition is presented and re-conceptualised by their owners, the geographical dwellers.