Nelly El Sharkawy’s Le Carnaval is a series of digital collage images, composed of elements taken from the artist’s large archive of photographs that document Cairo’s architecture. In an attempt to categorize Cairo’s landmark neighborhoods into what she observes as their architectural prototypes, El Sharkway creates hybrids of buildings that come together like a seamless object and at other times as a misshapen amalgamation of one area’s disparate components. In this collection, she ventures into Maadi, Heliopolis, Mokattam, Downtown and Nasr City. Each neighborhood is presented in three images where the different timelines, histories and demographics of each neighborhood show in the scale, use of greenery and palette.
The stacked towers of Nasr City– originally built in the 1960s in brutalist super blocks as a national project and heavily expanding in the early 2000s into a display of neoliberal flash building— tell a strikingly different story from Maadi’s origins in colonial short houses and art deco add-ons. The Moqattam area has gone through socio-economic transformations that allow for the parallel of private villas and the shattered slum buildings damaged in the 1992 Cairo earthquake. El Sharkawy attempts to encompass all these facets into her proposed summation of an immeasurable city.
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