This Research Lecture explores one of the projects awarded a Heritage at Risk Grant, which was made possible by supporters of the Egypt Exploration Society raising over £10,000 in 2020.
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The objective of Shubra’s Archive is to preserve the oral history of Cairo’s Shubra neighbourhood before it undergoes rapid urban transformation due to the district’s historical significance. By documenting these shifts and tracing the district’s origins, we aim to highlight its importance and share its diverse cultural heritage with the local residents. Thanks to a fruitful collaboration with the Egypt Exploration Society, The American University in Cairo, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a team of researchers convened in 2021 to establish the methodological and theoretical groundwork of Shubra’s Archive, Egypt’s pioneering neighbourhood-based community archival space. After introducing these framings, this presentation will specifically focus on the inaugural project of Shubra’s Archive, which explored Cairo’s vanished tramlines and their role in the modernisation of Egypt’s capital.
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Dr Mina Ibrahim, an anthropologist and archivist from Cairo, Egypt, holds a doctoral degree in Cultural Studies. He is the founder of Shubra’s Archive, Egypt’s first neighbourhood communal archival hub. His debut book, Identity, Marginalization, Activism, and Victimhood in Egypt: Misfits in the Coptic Christian Community (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), is based on field research in different Egyptian cities. Mina’s contributions include articles in academic journals and book chapters, as well as public outlets. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Marburg, Germany, focusing on human rights discourses in migration societies. His research is influenced by his experience managing the MENA Prison Forum (MPF), shaping his interdisciplinary and transnational approach.
hello and welcome everyone I am delighted to be here with you all today for this our brand new series at the Egypt exploration Society a series of research lectures uh exploring some of the projects that the EES has supported so the Heritage at risk grants supported uh projects following the covid pandemic and uh this project is slightly different from what the EES normally funds but nonetheless we are very excited to have had the opportunity to support sh’s archive and we will be finding out more today in sh’s archive and cairo’s trams a community Archive of a changing City and introducing uh our speaker for today and director of this Arch uh director and founder of this archive uh Mina Ibrahim an anthropologist and archist from Cairo Egypt who holds a doctoral degree in cultural studies so he is the founder of shas’s Ara Egypt’s First Neighborhood communal archival Hub his debut book identity marginalization activism and victimhood in Egypt Misfits in the Coptic Christian Community is based on field research in different Egyptian cities currently he is postdoctoral research associate at the University of marberg Germany focusing on human rights discourses in migration societies so once again thank you so much Mina for joining us I think I could say on behalf of all of us at the eses and uh the attendees here today thank you so much for this very interesting update on your eses supported project thank you so much yeah thanks a lot thanks uh Charlotte and thanks everyone for joining me today and I’m so glad that uh for this opportunity to to present the work in front of um like friends and maybe members of egyptic Separation society today um as charlot said we got this Grand back in 2020 uh 2 actually which was between 2021 2022 uh thanks to our friend Carla Graves and also FMA Kish who used to work also with Egypt experation Society the Egyptian archaeologist and Carl of course uh he’s also working for Egypt expression Society um and actually the the grant for me was was kind of uh um very helpful to to to do the project but at the same time it was very kind of interesting because Egypt exporation Society for me as I know it and as I know FMA my friend uh mainly is focusing on on archaeology um and like so ancient Egyptian uh monuments in Egyptian history more or less but I think the Heritage at risk uh even talking with caral Graves as well like it was really interesting um opportunity for both Egypt exporation site to expand I mean on other projects or other understandings of Heritage so it’s not just The Monuments not just the pyramids not just you know the fonic Heritage actually but also things that are connected to to modern history and uh and this is for me was was interesting um and that’s connected to shar’s work as well because in shra um we are um just let me change the slide yeah so in subra actually we are uh interested in uh if want we are an interdisciplinary archival Hub in in in Cairo in subra which is a northern it’s a neighborhood in North Cairo and also we are interested in different in using different methods different tools we are interested in putting different methods uh in conversation with each other so for example we use um oral history interviews we use as well paper archives and as well we use if you want uh uh cultural heritage from movies songs comic stories and even newspapers magazines like you know like connected to the paper archives as well but we are interested in putting all of these methods together and to build out of them our archive so our archive is not just based on paper archives but also uh based on uh uh linking these archives uh with people’s everyday lives I’m linking these archives with people’s everyday interaction so uh we use this kind of if you want interdisciplinary or mix or or mix of methods uh we put it um in practice in our first project which was about the chiro tramways so the project of of Cairo of of investigating KIRO Trum ways that existed in Cairo between 1896 until 201 2018 2019 when the last Trum car was removed from Kyo streets sadly for me but happy for happily for maybe other people um that kyo’s uh trem lines uh are actually entered Kyo streets and were deinstalled from Kyo streets um for what we discovered that they were the uh what happened actually that this was done for the same reason which is mainly the modernization of Ky and this is very interesting point that I would like to to further investigate with you today but before that very quickly the project um of Kyo Trum was our first learning research program that we started 2021 2022 and currently we have another project called family house home as Archive of a changing City this is our second learning research program between 2023 2024 where uh in chra we invite uh people researchers artists from different disciplines from different backgrounds to uh learn some of our methods of our tools that I shared with you the oral history the archival methods the paper archival methods and then to implement these methods these tools into individual projects connected to the overall uh over a theme which is was kyos strum ways the first project and now it’s the the concept of family house and how we can connect to it we are actually having potential projects coming in the loop inshallah like we have things connected to Machinery spaces in subra we have also things related to football as well and the history of football in in in in subra and in Ciro in general but these are coming in the coming years if not in the coming months maybe I will talk about the last thing which is the pack participatory archival Charter but I will leave it uh at the end for now I just want to uh present to you our outputs for the project uh which resulted again from the different methods this about the tram project from the different methods as you can see the Egypt exp Society was one of the main F like funders of the of the of the project together with the American University in Cairo and the Andro melon foundation in the project or in the book uh and also this is a flyer of our um one of our exhibitions actually that we did thanks to Egypt exporation Society but also we did another Exhibition at the American University in Ciro and another one at in subra itself where the uh shra archive is based so both our exhibition and our book plus also a podcast that we did in Arabic as well were Keen or we were concerned of two things first of all different the different methods that I keep to mention uh for the third time now and plus also the different audience um in chra we are very interested in different audience and we are concerned at how different audience different people in Egypt and outside Egypt eypt will respond or will interact with our so um and this is something that that doesn’t have an answer what I’m going to say now the I mean not not the problem but I mean the puzzle that I’m going to propose now but it’s mainly uh essential work of our essential part of our work so I will recall two things the first is a book talk so in March this year uh together with other authors in the book so I edit this book together with my friend Tam nadii but in the book there are different chapters different authors uh wrote uh inside the book one of them actually is present with us now in the zoom yes me so the in the book talk actually we asked I proposed the question to the to the audience asking the people do you are you interest or did you feel kind of um dis disappointed that the that the tram lines were deinstalled from Cairo that were removed from Cairo and the answer that I got that most of the people attending the book talk if it’s it’s actually with the book talk just to give you an idea it was held in one of ky’s neighborhoods the audience were mainly um residents uh kind of not um they are not really kind of um uh specialized in social sciences or Humanities uh but they are residents like you know who are actually interested in the history of their neighborhood and the history of Cairo so they were they were feel very sad about the urban changes that are happening and that happened in Cairo that led to the gradual deinstallation of the tram lines from Kyo stre and many of them actually were talking about that you know the that they really missed the tram lines how they were using it and how they you know were were really sad about it and then I did during the the the talk I did what I usually like to do when I teach just to provoke people right to to say the counter narrative although me myself I’m also sad about the de instillation of the TR lines and I say this without any shame right but I told them the opposite you know I just play the the other like uh party of of the debate and asked them okay uh but do you know that when the tram lines were installed in Cairo they were also installed based on Urban changes that also displaced people from their houses that also closed shops that also drallyn in 1896 many people didn’t like it and then they told me okay but we are leaving now you know and then we are just you know we are we we were happy with it now and our lives now are um were kind of negatively affected sometimes for example people would mainly depend on the trm lines to go to their work or even take it as a leisurely space right to use it as a leisurely space where they just can see you know car streets Through the Windows of the trm cars uh others even were using it because it was cheap as well like a kind of public transportation cheaper than taking a taxi or even taking a bus so uh so they were concerned more about their current times but then again I insisted on okay but then our uh maybe ancestors our grandparents and Grand grandparents maybe they didn’t like it at the time and as I said I don’t have an answer to this puzzle right because using the this kind of debate you know whether we we like tram lines or didn’t like it whether we liked when it was deinstalled or we didn’t like it it’s actually not um something it’s of course part of our individual uh uh preferences right and maybe you can even do this with any ch changes that happen uh in your cities or in your neighborhoods but at the same time part of our work in chra archive is really to connect what people say so our interviews with the people oral history interviews with the people whether they like it or not they like the tram lines or not and to link it to the paper archives and try to build a conversation between them so what we did in this book and also what we do also in in our projects uh that we are playing game kind of a game so we we we take the paper archives that we actually uh uh buy or that we accidentally find in a second Market you know uh at a street vendor or something and we try to build interviews questions for the people that we will meet for the oral history interviews and this is something that is is kind of rarely done in academic work in formal academic work because us usually you know in methods or methodological uh there are kind of methological Divisions right if you want like historians would go to the paper archives maybe Anthropologist would okay rely somehow on or history interviews but mainly on ethnographic field work and participate observation but we are in order to be kind of inclusive space not only for audience different audience but also for different researchers who might have different backgrounds and different research interests and different disciplines belonging as well so we try to make this game right to to build oral history interviews or interviews questions out of the um uh paper archives and the opposite to read people’s answers to our questions in the interviews we do with them to read these uh uh uh answers uh uh and to take them as kind of interpretation of the paper archives let me give you an example so one thing for instance we did is the people we we in in the archives we found a a complaint written by uh a person who was complaining about the noise done by the Trump course that was in the early 20th century I think 193 1914 something like that and this is part of the archives that we have for the project in in shra and then so what we what we did actually that during our interviews we also found people who actually were um complaining about also how the trem lines were very at the end of their you know at the end of its life cycle you know in Cairo they were also very slow they were very uh uh uh kind of there was no M maintenance happening to them so we tried to build connect the dots between them so what we did actually is we um together with the help of of a friend moel our our our colleague also in chra archive we built kind of a comic story building a human relationship between this person who wrote the complaint and our interlocutor or our inter interviewee as if this interlocutor that we did with him the interview is the grandson of the person who wrote the complaint and we did kind of a comic story it’s actually uh if you want it’s an extra publication or extra thing that we sell with the book actually it’s available uh in Arabic as well so we kind of bring the complaint very real thing that happened and we we quoted the person with whom we did the interview and we build with them a fictional uh relationship but this is again this is one was one of our very first experiments that we do in order to link how different people in different times they relate to the same object which is in this uh case the tram lines but then you can say with football with family house with missionary spaces that the other projects that we are working on as well so the thing is that is to link what we um uh to to invite historians to invite like people who are mainly interested in paper archives to build a conversation with Anthropologist or sociologists people who mainly do field work research people who mainly are interested in uh talking to people because we believe in subra that um things like one thing is not enough or one solution one method is not enough we should actually always build conversations between different uh uh methods so this is for the methods right but for the audience back to the audience so there is the concept of nostalgia right that we are always dealing with right whether we look at the days p days and we think you know that past days are better than now and then now is will be better than tomorrow you know and this uh kind of even Loop that we are living in so interestingly you know whenever you mentioned nostalgia in in Academia or academic settings maybe many of you would be part of the maybe academic uh setting or venue we’ always make this right Nostalgia and then we’ll be always talking about it in a very kind of you know uh uh um yeah defensive way like yeah we don’t mean Nostalgia or we are not interested in Nostalgia we just you know and then but then when you talk to people they are always like you know people who are maybe again not specialized in Academia they are always interested in Nostalgia they know they say we have Nostalgia to the tra we have Nostalgia to uh getting into the tra and going to this park we have Nostalgia to actually the old days when we were uh kind of thinking of uh uh taking my my when my father was taking me on a on a weekend and getting into kind of a road trip with the with the tram car so how can we balance right because usually there’s um you know that there is difference usually between history and memory right so there is kind of history that if you if you check the history of the tram lines according to the paper archives and according to police records according to newspapers I mean there was sexual harassment in the past in the tram line in the tram cars like now there’s sexual harassment in public transportation there was accidents like I mean there are a lot of people who were killed actually because of the trm cars um there were also um kind of uh as I mentioned complaints by people complaining about the noise of the tram or complaining that the tram cars were not coming at their time you know they were usually the schedules are usually not working well so this is history this is kind of what we can get from this so history is not just about the good days of the trem lines you know when when when people were like H happily uh living right but there is the memory as well there’s the memory that we should respect you know and this we should also work on and we should not be little because since we chose to to work with people uh since we chose not only to work with archives with paper archives um and we work to to we choose oral history sorry as a method to work with so we should also think of how people’s memory matter right and to try to build these kind of conversations between um people’s memory and the history right and to not to it’s not about convincing people actually that this is know what what you have about what you have with your memory is wrong and that is the history but no is actually to build this provide this space for conversation and this actually what we are interested in doing with shra that we are not only interested in writing books this is actually was our first book and there is another book that is coming uh later in this year but also with with exhibitions as well that we do and through the exhibitions we do maybe open talks we do side you know talks uh public conversations with people who are interested in the theme uh we are uh covering so and that’s why when we did this book talk back in March uh it was really interesting to really kind of uh uh uh play this memory history thing and play this Nostalgia but uh no but and also to to impose actually to to propose or to talk about actually the uh dark history of the tram like I can tell you something for example like I that I proposed I told the people that I told them the trm lines were introduced by a Belgian company you know and that and at that time Belgium was as we know that it was a a colonizing force it was a colonizer right and it was actually uh committing I mean the the the Belgian regime at that time was committing a lot of crimes in many parts of Africa right to mention Congo for instance so um so this money how we can think of how this was part maybe of the Belgian Empire or the Belgian State at that time you know and how they introduced the term line so I mean you know so just to talk about how there it was part of the economic power of Belgium who was again committing crimes in Congo you know so just to link things together and even to move beyond the national boundaries of Egypt uh but then you can still find people saying yeah but we still like the Trum and then we we go further you know back and and forth with this kind of sentence and these kind of debates but for me this kind of dialectic is really interesting in order to be available and be uh present for uh people different kind different audiences and different um categories of the Egyptian population whose relationship to the tram or to any thing that we work on are different and I think this is actually part of our U Mission if you want talking about Mission this is part of our mission as a community people’s oriented archival Hub or people oriented archival Center that we don’t impose uh uh uh categories we don’t impose readings of History right uh yesterday we were having another talk with EA the French Institute for archaeology in Cairo uh like two of my colleagues Y and Iman were giving also a talk and and uh we they were talking about this kind of peoples oriented archive so we are not doing people’s oriented history we are not making a reading of History maybe we we do some but our main mission is to build an archival uh collection of different themes of different topics you know open one connected to shra and connected to other neighborhoods in Cairo as well where the residents would come that’s our big where the residents would come and then they would kind of continue reading uh do readings and do debates based on these archives and based on their conversations with each other based on the interviews they will do with each other so our students who attend our programs our learning research programs later become researchers who do interviews and then the people with whom we do the interviews later join our programs and we go into this uh Circle to to to go like further like our project with the tram as I mentioned uh is the first the second is a family house but in the middle actually also during the year on the year 2022 we did a small uh Workshop called leisurely shra as you can see documentation of entertainment of entertainment and social practice in chra it was with the um partnership with of kazana U school of Heritage in Cairo and also founded by sedz which is a French Research Institute in Cairo actually one of our uh motivations to do this project as well was our project of the TR because as I mentioned tram projects the tram lines of the tram cars were used as a leisurely space for some people so actually they inspired us later to further expand of meanings of leisure meanings of entertainment in shra what you can see on the map is actually the map of shra in North Cairo there is the Nile right and then there is what you can see these small stickers are actually what the people uh perceive as leisurely spaces like right so in in the event that we did again we invited the people to uh we give them stickers so these are our categories right that we built maybe a kiosk um a church theater uh a park uh walking by the Nile a coffee house um even um a fruit shop whatever it is you know that they can perceive as as leisurely spaces and then they would put the stickers on the uh on the map so again as you can see you know we we academically speaking right this would be very nostalgic right this would be very kind of okay people are just remembering the old days the old golden days you know of what they were doing before maybe before the parks uh sadly now in shra and in other districts in Ciro are now deserted uh and now turned into just highways and buildings also Cinemas you know SRA used to have more than 20 cinemas now there is none or just there is one Cinema that is placed in a shopping mall so people of course would remember this so you know for academics you know no the question of nostalgia let’s further work on it and let’s just make a further reading on it and this I can do in an academic paper but in shra it’s no I’m interested in investigating okay talking more with people about the Nostalgia thinking with people more about the Nostalgia and try to again bring this as I said the history right and put it in conversation with his with their memory so this is just to make kind of again an example of how we put history and memory or paper archives and oral history uh interviews uh together there is just a short very short video maybe an indication also of the new project the family house that you are working on and then I will end very quickly with the participatory archival chat so maybe if I can just play it for you just a few seconds yeah so this is just a quick thing a quick teaser if you want of our new project now family house it’s again as you can see a building our actually friend George marcario who um uh like is also a photographer and also filmmaker he was taking you know a snapshot or a second of this building every day until it was completely demolished and then again this kind of how we can so as you can see the title for today is actually a combination between our TR project and our current project which is a changing City so how can what debates happen in a changing City what do people say when there are this you know very fast drastic Urban changes uh that are happening in Kira but also in Egypt that we cannot follow right uh uh for me uh to defend Nostalgia somewhat some somehow Nostalgia can be a mechanism right that can be if you want a medicine or can it can be a painkiller actually that people can use in order to uh I mean telling their nostalgic memories I mean the people can use in order to face these drastic changes that are happening without they taking their opinion you know people are just waking up no tramps waking up no Park waking up no Cinema so talking about these memories and that’s what also our mission part of our mission in sura as well that to capture this memories this no Nostalgia and to respect it uh in order to help people to uh uh um uh if you want to not to fight back this would be a big word but at least to uh um internally resist right or to what what what they see or what they witness on a daily life in Ciro so very uh finally finally uh the pack the participatory archival shter I want to share with you this so this is an agenda called we call it chra archive agenda it’s it’s uh this is its first edition actually it was uh curated by again y who’s joining us today and by myself and inside it um it’s actually divided into different um this is our very recent output actually different like uh projects so each it divide into sections each section is a project mainly uh trm lines the leisurely shra the family house the football project and the what we called as well um archival archiving everyday life which is actually a general project that we did as a exhibition last year but to mention very quick thing about the participant archival Charter so mainly what we are trying to do through it and through this agenda as well is not to um accumulate archives we are not interested in accumulating paper archives but we are more interested in uh helping people to how to curate to build categories to make kind of so this agenda is like kind of a tool that you can use in order to write down what they think about the urban changes happening to them to provide them again with the tools the different methods that I mentioned and to help them to curate their own private family or and also to build their own categories so maybe they have other projects in mind maybe they are not interested in any of our projects that I mentioned here right but maybe they have other things that they have to they want to put it down in this agenda so this agenda is actually um we offer it in subra for the residents in subra and other neighborhoods in order to help them to understand these Urban changes happening to them and then we call them later we ask them later to bring the agendas in order to build this uh Community um uh uh like uh dialogue with the people who are interested in archiving uh their lives yeah thank you so much thank you so much Mina what a brilliant start to our new research lecture series and I think a great way to introduce again the Heritage at risk projects and how they demonstrate the value of uh both tangible but intangible cultural heritage across Egypt in this case so thank you so much for for a brilliant talk well thank you so much no thanks a lot Charlotte for this yeah thank you so much it was great I mean I’m I’m happy even to open the lecture series with you and that was an honor yeah thanks a lot well we we’ve been honored to have you and uh explore just one element of the Heritage at risk projects and how exciting it is and we’ll definitely be following your journey as you expand and do exciting things in future so thank you very much thank you so much thank you to everyone who attended and uh we hope to see you at another eses event soon thanks everyone bye