Bias Repository
Arab Spring Collection and Tahrir Square Collection
These two realms of repositories houses collected research around the Arab Spring and more specifically around the chosen site of intervention - Tahrir Square. The Arab Spring '(Arabic: الربيع العربي)' was a series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions in response to oppressive regimes and a low standard of living. These events spread across much of the Muslim countries in the Arab world including Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Bahrain. This started from as early as 2010. Focusing on the context of Egypt, the repository merely collects historic recordings in pictures, films, testimonies, images and audio that unearth various perspectives and meanings of the square.
Keywords: surveil, document, oppose, hybridize, echo, demography, map, institute, border, threshold, passage, margin/edge, migrant architectures, spatial justice, trade, ways of building
Tahrir Square
This collection 'houses' the research about the proposed site of intervention, Tahrir Square. The characteristics and relationships it possesses with the local people are explored and identified. Furthermore, more specific spaces of Tahrir Square and methods for ‘holding truth’ are identified in a climate of censoring and erasure by the regime.
Keywords: Histories, image, record, analysis, site, record, timeline, surveil, document, map, public space, spatial justice, ways of building
Symbolic Square – Tahrir Square (Cairo, Egypt)
The square has been both a practical and symbolic home of movements - large enough to accommodate the movement's masses, and with a prominent role in the country's history of change and tumult. Its controversial history possess a wide framework of biases and truths. The site has been documented from various angles, perspectives, narratives which dilute truths and facts around truths of the square and what it meant for the country over the years. Recently, the square has been getting the attention it deserves and is already looking nothing like its old self. For months now, the square has been receiving a facelift as revolutionary in its scope as it is unusual in detail. The public view the rehabilitation project as a form of the regime re-writing various truths of the square and suppressing its powers. It is also understood that Egyptian security forces have blocked access to Tahrir Square as part of a wide-ranging crackdown aimed at heading off planned protests against the regime in future instances.
This makes it hard for us to design efficiently for such spaces in the case where we need to. This prototype reconstructs various important areas of the square truthfully as a basis of creating interventions that attempt to create spaces where various truths are added to, archived, disposed to the general public in Egypt.
Site Deconstructors
These set of models challenges means of deconstructing space/site conventionally. Focusing on key areas of Tahrir Square, it unpacks the site through by drawing on alternative views of a space using existing information disseminating mediums. Beyond this, other pieces try to question and answer how we see beyond the frames of what we choose to see by extending viewpoints.
This series of pieces become a first step to developing a methodology or toolset to understanding and unpacking of a space, by firstly understanding it through speculative experiments that unpacked.
"Drawing provides a fresh vantage point to a traveler without a map. Even if we don't know where we're going, by relying on intuition and drawings only what we see, a logic evolves to guide us onwards."
- Chip Sullivan2008
“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.”
