Mound of Fortune — Manar Moursi

Archival footage from the collection of Cimatheque, Alternative Film Center. Supported by a fellowship at the Harvard Film Study Center and a research grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. Thanks to Carine Doumit for her editorial consultation, Farida Youssef for her feedback, and Thomas Sanchez Lengeling for his advice and assistance with the installation. Photos by Thomas Sanchez Lengeling and myself.

Mound of Fortune Goethe-Institut, Cairo, 2026

In July 2026, I opened my Takhshina studio at the Goethe-Institut Cairo on Mound of Fortune, a multi-channel video installation from my ongoing research on Egypt's Mediterranean coast, which considers the shoreline as ground that is made and remade: dug, filmed, sold, enclosed, and harvested. Shown as work in progress the installation comprised three works:

The Spoils / الغنيمة, a four-channel installation, traced a coast hauled into being through convict labor, sand excavation, and terraforming, and, alongside that, Bedouins harvesting figs from trees rooted in older claims to the land even as that ground was seized and remade: land made available, and the lives it displaced.

The Arrivals / الوافدون, a three-channel installation, spanned nearly a century of the coast's image and use: a sequence of stills from anonymous 1930s footage of a day at the beach, contemporary holidaymakers inside a gated compound, and the netting of migratory birds west of Matrouh, leisure, fantasy, enclosure, and capture unfolding side by side.

Palm Beach / شاطئ النخيل, a single-channel video and still a work in progress, was filmed over a single day on the public beach at Agami, west of Alexandria, once an elite summering retreat, opened to the public through decades of disinvestment, and now threatened by renewed enclosure and state seizure. Children flew kites, families gathered, teenagers posed for the camera, couples sought spaces of privacy. As daylight gave way to night, the beach became a place of encounter, intimacy, surveillance, and risk: a fragile public space, made possible by abandonment, inhabited through improvised forms of freedom, and increasingly vulnerable to capture.