Grids, Ghosts and Glitches credits

Facilitated by Farida Gohar (poet and anthropologist) and Hoda Marwan (singer and sound artist) and myself. Public program co-curated with Sarah Sarofim. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. The collective poetic-sonic work was created with Sarah Ayoub, Osama Mohsen, Seham Shaheen, and Leqa’a Al-Sa’adi.

More from The Loudspeaker and the Tower:
Grids, Ghosts and Glitches

The Loudspeaker and Tower at ARD

Letters from Distant Orbits

A light, a loudspeaker, a parrot

Loudspeaker and Tower at TSV

Loudspeaker and Tower Zine

Loudspeaker at KAG

Mud, Minarets and Meaningless Events

Stairway to Heaven

Storm Over Cairo

Grids, Ghosts and Glitches ARD, Cairo, 2025
A bridge, a park, a mosque: infrastructure is never only steel and concrete. It settles into memory, carried by the people who pass through it, and returns to them later in objects, sounds, and stories long after they've left the place behind. As part of the public program for The Loudspeaker and the Tower at ARD, I co-led a two-day workshop inviting participants to begin from a personal memory or object tied to a piece of Cairo's infrastructure, a park, bridge, highway, underpass, or mosque, building short texts through collage poetry, guided writing, and field recording. The first day was spent at Merryland Park in Heliopolis, a historic public park with shifting paths, fences, rides, and planted islands. Walking the park, participants recorded its everyday textures, footsteps on gravel, gates, vendors, rides, birdsong, and layered these under voices reciting fragments of their own collage texts, gathering it all into a collective sound piece played from the loudspeaker in the exhibition during the finissage.