This Stays Between Us

This Stays Between Us is a collaboration between Dena Al-Adeeb and Nada Shalaby involving the creation of a quasi-fictive archive by two subjects in dialogue, each presenting and responding to photographic images, video, text, animated GIFs, and other materials relating personal and historical narratives of the city of Cairo. The relationally generated archive evokes the space between fantasy and reality and lends itself as an alternative to official archives of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

In Part I (2016), the artists exchange historical documents, multimedia, and personal memories as they relate to the formation of images of the prominent Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi and contemporary women participating in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. The exchange revolved around constructing a fictive archive that represents the urban subconscious of Cairo and its psychogeography (a term coined by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord).

In Part II (2018), the generated archive becomes a by-product of a walking practice, mapping movement through the exchange of material that connects personal memory and embodied experiences in the city with both historical and contemporary issues.

Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read… This is a sort of knowledge that remains silent. Only hints of what is known but unrevealed are passed on “just between you and me.”