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Sidewalk Salon: 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo
Onomatopee and Kotob Khan, Eindhoven and Cairo, The Netherlands and Egypt, 2015
Sidewalk Salon—co-authored with David Puig—follows Cairo’s pavement chairs: patched-up armchairs, brick-propped sofas, and battered office seats that line the streets like unofficial hosts. Polaroid photographs pair with our introductory essay, tracing how these makeshift perches register resourcefulness, surveillance, rest, and talk. Short interviews let the chair-owners tell their own stories, while commissioned fiction and poetry (Arabic and English) invite writers to imagine the daily life of a single neighbourhood seat. The result is a portrait of Cairo’s sidewalks as places where repair, encounter, and quiet assertion happen one chair at a time.
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Article on Onomatopee ↗︎
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