Everything that Remains to be Lived credits mobile

Esraa el Fekky filmed Everything that Remains to be Lived in 2022. It was shown in Zurich in 2023 at On Curating as part of the group show Stories of Water, Chapter IV: Wounded and Healing Waters, curated by Bianca Bauer, Nora Brown, Mary Lilith Fischer, Norma Grey, Margherita Martini, Ahmed Morsi, Smadar Samson, and Kate Tsui.

This work was also shown in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2024 at Swimming Pool as part of the group show Ecologies of the Prehod, curated by Off-site - Pauline Shongov, Maya Shopova, and Borislav Angelov.

Everything that Remains to be Lived Sliven, Sofia, and Cairo, 2022, 2024

The golden age of Egyptian bathhouses was during Ottoman rule. According to some historical accounts, Cairo had more than 137 bathhouses. Currently, there are only four fully functional hammams remaining from this time period. Almost a century before Egypt, Bulgaria was also occupied by the Ottomans, an occupation that lasted 500 years yielding multiple hamams also. As a prompt for the Off-site project, I received two stones from an Ottoman bathhouse in Bulgaria that is no longer in use. Left to time and no longer maintained, this bathhouse is slowly transforming into a site of ruin. I decided to bathe with these stones as pumice: rubbing my body as embalming, dissolving the stones’ minerals into my pores, and mixing stone with rolls of my dead skin. The repetitive rubbing became a form of release and exertion, of care, wearing away, preservation, and wound.

I performed this ritual of embalming and bathing in the hammam known as Malatili or Margush in Cairo, which dates from 1780, and is said to have been established at the time of an Ottoman Wali, Ismail Pasha.The resulting work is a two-channel video from the two sites, which is part of the larger project Two Stones and Heaven is a Fountain in the Garden of your Veins. The second site I chose to perform in, is the site of the recently collapsed Cairene Ottoman bathhouse, Hammam el Tambali. The stone in this channel of the video had an added softness to it. I employed it as a drawing tool to carefully discern the bumps, cracks, and intricate details that compose the walls of the Tambli bathhouse. Stone against stone: the lines it made were intended to soothe and trace.

To read more about this project, check Pauline Shongov’s writing: “Brick, Dust, Matter: The Disappearing Archive and the Mobile Fragment,” Metode (2024), vol. 2 Being, Bathing and Beyond.

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Esraa el Fekky filmed Everything that Remains to be Lived in 2022. It was shown in Zurich in 2023 at On Curating as part of the group show Stories of Water, Chapter IV: Wounded and Healing Waters, curated by Bianca Bauer, Nora Brown, Mary Lilith Fischer, Norma Grey, Margherita Martini, Ahmed Morsi, Smadar Samson, and Kate Tsui.

This work was also shown in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2024 at Swimming Pool as part of the group show Ecologies of the Prehod, curated by Off-site - Pauline Shongov, Maya Shopova, and Borislav Angelov.