Moataz Nasr

Fatma Ismail Afifi, The Kom Ghorab project in Cairo in Art Criticism and Africa, edited by Katy Deepwell, Saffron Books, 1997. (www.eapgroup.com/saffron3.htm)

The project is located in a quatter area in old Cairo called Kom Ghorab meaning Crow's Hill where a certain indeterminism prevails. The area is divided by a main road with steep embankments. There are many local potteries in this area. The walls of the sqatter houses became the site on which the artists began to work. They face each other across a bleak stretch of road. Here, everything is a possibility... and everything a mere coincidence. Both noises and poverty prevail. This is a place where chaos rules. The emergence of squatter areas are often seen as an exception to the rule and a place where chaos defies all the established rules of time and place in the city. [...] The experiment started in October 1996 with the interaction between the artists and the squatter neighbourhood families. [...] Moreover, the radical change that the district and behaviour of its people have undergone is by far the most interesting result. Nowadays, some of the inhabitants of the squatter area could be seen crossing the road to look at the panorama of the whole district. In fact one of the local workers had drawn a sketch for the decoration of some walls and is now participating in carrying it out. There is still more to come out of this pioneering experiment. All we have to do now is to wait and see the result of this experiment.

Richard Woffenden and Steve Negus, The State of the Artists. “Why, when everything else is privatized, does the government still run all the galleries and major theathers?” Artist Mohammed Abla on artistic revival in “Cairo Times”, 16/10/1997, vol. 1, n. 17.

He [Mohammed Abla] spearheaded the campaign to preserve Kom Ghurab, a downtown slum, from demolition when Abla and others turned the walls into murals, the community into an open-air museum.