A public square in the heart of Cairo, Midan Al-Tahrir (Liberation Square) has been made and unmade in different ways since its inception, most notably as the main site of protest for the Arab Spring beginning in 2011. To dissuade any inclination towards a new revolution, the last few years have seen the systematic erasure of the traces of protest under military rule.

The Many Sides of the Square looks at fiction and filmmaking as a tool to explore this erased multiplicity of Tahrir using only the information and research that can be accessed from afar. This body of work forms a series of fictional animated acts, using cinematic and spatial tools to question the power dynamics prevalent within the making and unmaking of the space.

In this fictional narrative of the Square and its surroundings, focus is placed on the use of screens at multiple scales – from the cell phone to the billboard – to highlight the importance of social media as an archive of current events, and the detrimental effect censorship and propaganda have on the depiction of events, and ultimately the identity of a space.

The Many Sides of the Square

M1

Hyperreal Prototypes