STUDIO TRIP TO CAIRO (CAIRO, EGYPT)
In the summer of 2000 I had the good fortune of winning a city atelier trip to Cairo. I traveled to Egypt and was granted the opportunity by Pro Helvetia to assemble an exhibition in the Karim Francis gallery. Mickry 3 and Ingo accompanied me to Cairo.
The motto of the exhibition, “east is east and west is west and the twain shall never meet,“ is a quote from the committed British chauvinist Rudyard Kipling. Today the statement is so common in Cairo that it is regarded as a saying from the time of Ramses the Third.
We duly celebrated this clever observation with a collectively constructed cube filling the
whole of the room, whose outer surfaces were ornamented with visual quotations from Egyptian daily
life. We took the logos of products found in grocery stores and combined them into a giant collage.
For background material we used the omnipresent mirror foil that was available at the bazaar in a thousand different colors. Walking around the largest Muslim city in the world with three young European women turned out to be trickier than expected. The local men folk whistled, patted, grabbed, pinched, fingered and clucked with unbridled delight.
ARTISTS: Mickry 3 / Ingo Giezendanner / Michael Schmacke / Hossam Abdallah