Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you. It is from this moment that we begin to build our home in the world. It is the place that we furnish with smell, taste, a talisman, a name. -1
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the real (i.e the world outside Disneyland) is real., whereas in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of hyperreal and of simulation” -2
Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you. It is from this moment that we begin to build our home in the world. It is the place that we furnish with smell, taste, a talisman, a name. -1
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the real (i.e the world outside Disneyland) is real., whereas in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of hyperreal and of simulation” -2
Siwelile Mathenjwa
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Siwelile Mathenjwa
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Siwelile Mathenjwa
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Siwelile Mathenjwa
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Siwelile Mathenjwa
The Hybridised Home
Homemaking in Cairo’s Necropolis
Natalie Harper
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Exploring the ‘city of the dead’ a cemetery dating back to the 17th century, which has become “One of the biggest necropolises is located inside Cairo. It is unclear how many people are living in the tombs of their families. Underneath the earth, several rooms are found. Migration, expensive housing, and natural disasters drove entire families to move into these Mausoleums and generations to be born in these conditions. Unusual in their forms, these structures have more of a resemblance to small houses than tombs .This project looks into the understanding of homemaking in a queer site, the city of the Dead, Eastern Cemetery of Cairo.
By producing a series of prototypes that unmask, reveal and subvert the stigma of tomb-dwelling.
As the space dynamics of these mausoleums become hybridize, home-making takes course.
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”(Baldwin 1956).
The project looks into the series of conditions that effect the people, i.e. Reasons behind this phenomenon, the grave difficulties they experience and ghosts of uncertainty. Research extends into the understanding of how these people adapt to the conditions whilst also making a livelihood.
Some of the research methodology will include model-making, drawing along with practices of unmasking, transfer and resemblance of the conventional home. Whilst looking at ethnographic drawings and digital recreations as a way of creating an archive of prototypes that breathes life into the to the subsistence of the downtrodden of Cairo…
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City Of The Dead, Cairo
Keywords:
Conditions, Home-making, Transfer, Hybridized, Doppelganger of the Conventional, Material Culture, Place-making, Life & Death, Co-Existing, Above & Below