From my room, margined by forests of red brick and concrete, green farmlands are only visible as pale dreams of a city almost dead. Displaced away from artistic, cultural, and financial resources, Kafr El Dawar is where our scene sets every night.
Kafr El Dauwar is a dormitory town, and also an agricultural one, forty kilometers from Alexandria; a place well-known for cotton factories that have slowly eroded what was once lush farmlands. The place is lifeless. Here, art is luxury people can do without.
Yunis, Suliman, Mo’men, and I have been friends for nine years, connecting over the rhythms of our music and the visuals of our art. For more than two years we have been sharing sleepless nights discussing, experimenting, and producing music. We launched our homegrown record label, Kafr El-Dauwar Records as a form of resistance.
Inspired by the Sartre’s existential play “Huis Clos” our images show the implementation and production of a musical and a visual product between a four-walled room. Our coffee table turns into a container where we pour the collective results of our readings and researches on art, philosophy, and music. The bedroom transforms from a private to a public place, where through our music we connect virtually and voice out our existence.
Fathi Hawas
Fathi Hawas (born in 1994, in Kafr Al Dawwar, Egypt) is an independent visual artist interested in conceptual documentary photography and contemporary art, He graduated from Faculty of Arts and Design of Pharos University – where he works as a teaching assistant now – and contemporary art school at MASS Alexandria. Presently he lives in Alexandria where his practice started with discovering the limitations of the medium by experimenting with different photographing tools in the context of discovering ‘Subjective Time’. He is also working on different cases happening far away from the centralization of the capital, and is concerned with documenting the changes of culture and subculture emotions and varieties within the city he lives in and cities he roams on his feet. Hawas participated in several group exhibitions internationally, e.g. in Cairo, Dubai, Denmark, London and Paris.
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