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"Roll, River, Roll — Stereographic River, Colonial Hydropolitics"
Forthcoming, 2025

 
From devotional stereographs that offered turn-of-the-century pilgrims a 3-D glimpse of holiness to colonial aerial surveys that mapped the valley from above, this essay traces how photographic images both mirrored and abetted the Jordan River’s passage from sacred threshold to militarized, monopolized resource. Twin optics—illusionary depth at eye level and extractive vision from above—conspired to naturalize a hydropolitics that controlled the river and rerouted its flow. Counter-images in the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive restore ground-level pleasure, land-rooted care, and insurgent memory. Originally written for the lecture-performance that accompanies Blue-Black (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2025) in Cairo and Berlin, this essay converses with the images gathered in Blue-Black Liver and will later appear as a standalone publication. Criticism & Academic Writing

"Workers Resting: Reclaiming Rest and Idleness as Resistance in Modern Egyptian Art and Politics"
MIT Thresholds 53, eds. Mingjia Chen and Joshua Tan, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2025
Anchored in Hamed Owais’s 1975 canvas Workers Resting, this essay tracks how Egyptian art moved from Orientalist caricatures of Arab idleness to nationalist images that yoked leisure to state-led productivity, and finally to Owais’s quiet counter-gesture of collective sleep. By placing the painting beside colonial bathhouse fantasies, Nasser-era youth-camp photographs, and a century of strike histories, it shows how rest itself became a contested arena of anti-colonial and class politics. Owais’s intertwined labourers recast exhaustion as solidarity and subtle defiance, exposing the unfinished struggle for dignity that still shapes Egypt’s contemporary working conditions.

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Criticism & Academic Writing

"Concrete Shores: Illusions and Desires of Total Control on the Littoral Edge of Egypt"
Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism, Leisurescapes in the Global Sunbelt, eds. Sibel Bozdoğan, Panayiota Pyla and Petros Phokaides, Routledge, London, UK, 2022
Post-independence Egypt's refashioned its Mediterranean beaches into open-air studios for a new social script, using architecture, infrastructure, and state-backed films to choreograph “modern” romances. Reading reels like the 1967 feature The Women’s Camp, this essay shows how the shoreline doubled as both literal edge and ideological media for molding ideal conjugal matches. Sun-splashed frames, however, expose the very repressions and desires that quietly unravel the State’s coastal agenda.
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Criticism & Academic Writing

"Regional Exchange and Knowledge Transfer through Building Practices: The Work of PACE in Yemen, 1968-2016"
Pan-Arab Modernism 1968-2018,  eds. Dalal Al Sayer and Ricardo Camacho, Actar Publishers, London, UK, 2021
Kuwait-based Pan Arab Consulting Engineers (PACE) arrived in war-scarred Yemen in 1968, carrying the Gulf’s oil-funded modernist know-how into clinics, universities, and mass housing that stretched from Hodeida to Sana’a. The essay shows how regional aid transformed architecture into soft power: concrete frames and recessed arches broadcast Arab solidarity yet often clashed with Yemen’s stone vernacular and climatic logics. By following five decades of PACE’s work, it unpacks a two-way exchange in which Kuwaiti geopolitics, Iraqi design ideas, and Yemeni landscapes forged a hybrid “Arab modernity” whose tensions still echo across the Red Sea and Gulf today. Download PDF ↓
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Criticism & Academic Writing

"Sharing and Building Modernities: Egyptian Architects in Kuwait 1950s-1990s"
Essays, Arguments & Interviews on Modern Architecture Kuwait, eds. Ricardo Camacho, Sara Saragoça Soares and Roberto Fabbri, Niggli, Zurich, CH, 2017
This chapter charts Kuwait’s early embrace of modernism through Egyptian architects Sayed Karim, Mahmoud Riad, Hassan Fathy, and Said Abdel-Moneim, who in the 1950s–80s carried Cairo’s avant-garde language to a fledgling Gulf capital. Their concrete cinemas, schools, and master plans often collided with Kuwait’s search for a home-grown voice, producing a charged friction between imported modernity and local meaning. As oil wealth re-defined the region in the 1970s–90s, the current reversed: Kuwait’s petro-powered skyline became the new model shaping Egyptian aspirations. The essay unpacks this two-way exchange to show how architecture maps shifting power and identity across the Arab world. Download PDF ↓
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Criticism & Academic Writing

"Cairo Chairs: Notes from the Cairo Sidewalk Salons"
The Funambulist, ed. Leopold Lambert, Paris, France, 2016
Cairo’s battered street chairs form the city’s largest open-air museum, where monobloc plastic rubs elbows with Rococo wood and every seat doubles as kiosk lounge, doorman’s watchtower, or political outpost. Tracking these humble thrones from nineteenth-century coffeehouses to the 2011 uprising and today’s sanitized “new capital,” the essay shows how informal furniture mediates work, gender, surveillance, and dissent—each chair acting as both comma and barricade in Egypt’s megacity. This text is a condensed, standalone version of a longer essay that appears in my book Sidewalk Salon: 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo, co-authored with David Puig.  (Onomatopee / Kotob Khan, 2015). Download PDF ↓
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Criticism & Academic Writing

"Reframing Back/What happens to the knowledge produced? On Egypt at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale"
Mada, Cairo, Egypt & Domus, Milan, Italy, 2016
This essay asks a blunt question: once Egypt’s pavilion research leaves the Giardini, who actually uses it? Moving from the Biennale’s galleries back to Cairo’s informal streets and gated deserts, the piece diagnoses Egypt’s twin urban trajectories—DIY sprawl for the many, escapist suburbia for the few—and profiles the mapping labs and design collectives trying to hack those realities. Rather than measuring finished buildings, it interrogates “knowledge production” itself: funding models, academic–community alliances, and whether biennial buzz can morph into concrete gains in housing, labor, and heritage policy. Download PDF ↓
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Criticism & Academic Writing

"In Other Words"
Official Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Italy, 2016
Commissioned for the pavilion catalogue, this text frames Egypt’s exhibit as a snapshot of architects and researchers working outside conventional commissions. It contrasts two dominant Egyptian growth patterns—informal urbanism and elite desert sprawl—and explains why mapping projects and experimental prototypes were chosen to spotlight issues of inequality, agency, and conservation. The essay argues that documenting Cairo’s layered crises is itself a political act, calls for wider collaboration with non-architect builder–makers, and ends with a set of open questions about how such ad-hoc institutions can survive, scale, and meaningfully reshape the built environment. Download PDF ↓
Criticism and Academic Writing

"The Sea We Would Like to See"
Tokyo Totem: A Subjective Guide to Tokyo, eds. Edwin Gardner and Christiaan Fruneaux, Flick Studio and Monnik, Tokyo and Amsterdam, Japan and the Netherlands, 2015
In this essay I ride the Odakyū main line south-west from Shinjuku to its last stop at Odawara, watching Tokyo thin into pitched-roof sprawl before it finally meets open Pacific. Then I pivot east, back along the bay, hunting the shoreline that modern Tokyo hides: Edo-era cannon islands, bubble-era resort landfills, the Metabolists’ floating “Marine City,” Expo ’70’s Aquapolis. Each stratum shows a capital that blesses, exploits, and fears the sea in equal measure. Threading those episodes with my own field notes of awe and unease, I ask whether a warming Pacific might yet revive Kikutake’s nomadic, modular utopias—so a post-terrestrial Tokyo can draw its boundary lines on water, not land. Download PDF ↓
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"Cairo’s Traveling Peep Show Boxes"
Cairobserver, ed. Mohamed el Shahed, Cairo, Egypt, 2014
A mirrored geodesic “disco-dome” and a pastel ice-cream cart become twenty-first–century heirs to the Sandook El Donya, the Middle Eastern peep-show box. In this article I follow the two roving “Wonder Boxes” as they roll from Shubra el-Kheima to Moqattam, folding projection-mapping, street storytelling, and improvised music into intimate four-person viewings. Part design diary, part urban ethnography, the piece shows how a traveling micro-theatre can stitch together Cairo’s disparate quarters with bubbles, mawwals, and mirrored light. Download PDF ↓
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Criticism & Academic Writing
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