Maia Gusberti: “C.Scapes”
Shedhalle / Exhibitions / Connect / Artists
Maia Gusberti: C.Scapes
C.Scapes
2 channel video (HD), 36 min, 2009 Soundrecordings and sound composition by
Mahmoud Refat
C.Scapes starts with a view of Cairo, spread underneath us, in its soundscape of honking cars, human voices, and the hustle and bustle of industrial compounds. Then we suddenly hear a female voice uttering, in Arabic, the impression that there’s no public space in Cairo. In the following frame a thin curtain veils the view of the city while voices from the off talk about forms, functions, conditions, and restrictions concerning public space – quite often contradicting each other.
Confronted with the rigorous regulations with regard to filming in the streets of Cairo and questioning what she was allowed to show and to tell and what not, Maria Gusberti filmed this ‘public space’ from places where there were no restrictions: from the rooms and roofs of private apartments and from viewing platforms for tourists. The shots almost seem like photographs, they hardly record any movement, they rarely show single persons, they never show a face. Cairo is shown from the outside or from above, in its pure surface, a landscape of concrete and satellite receivers, a C-Scape. We can only imagine the life taking place in the streets, in the parks, in the malls the voices are talking about. Since the artist in the installation uses two projections, alternating between panoramic views and opposing pictures, the perspective seems slightly disaligned, or doubled, or segmented. Often window frames cut through the picture, or the view is blurred by curtains – thus creating a visual abstraction, a distance to what the many voices we hear talk about: the possibility of making this space, of making Cairo really their own city.
Toward the middle of the video we hear hilarious singing, music making, cheerful children’s voices, and the impression the woman voiced in the beginning of the video seems to come back, as an echo in the end: “After all, this city is beautiful, extremely beautiful, but life here, with the inflation we have and everything else, is chaos, too, people live with it, right now, it still works ...” The open end of this video from the year 2009, which will have an interactive follow-up*, implicitly refers to and evokes what has happened in the streets of Cairo in the meantime.
* The project Urbanpath/Cairo Mindscape (with Magdi Mostafa) supported by Sitemapping is not yet ready at the time being. In the exhibition we show C.Scapes.
In addition the project was supported by Pro Helvetia Cairo and BMUKK Austria.