The Latest at Goethe

Two years after the revolution on Tahrir Square the military and the Muslim Brotherhood are wrestling for power in Egypt. But the cultural revolutionary movement has also carved itself out some latitude. We visited the club culture project Ten Cities in Cairo. By Andreas Fanizadeh

We are seated on three purple plastic chairs that the waiter placed in a lay-by on the dusty alleyway in downtown Cairo for us. A not very small lorry rolls past only inches from our feet. A honking scooter pushes its way past in the other direction. Then they roll backwards again: an old Chevrolet, the not very small lorry and other rickety looking vehicles. The waiter expertly crosses the street and sets up a small table in front of us. It fits into the tiny space, too. We are drinking black tea or Nescafé. Diagonally opposite us is the Townhouse Gallery, a low building that was once an auto repair shop. Fifteen years ago an independent art space was created here that is also linked with the current pro-democracy movement on Tahrir Square.

This evening, the young artist Doa Aly will open her show at the Townhouse: multiple videos of ballet dancers projected onto narrow and wide screens in the space. They are minimalist, physical, free after a poem by Ovid, as she says. Right next door, the electronic musicians of Diamond Version (Olaf Bender aka Byetone from Chemnitz and Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto from Berlin) are expected in the narrow lanes of downtown Cairo for the next evening. Together with Wetrobots and Bikya from Cairo, they will be performing at Rawabet Theater on the initiative of the Goethe-Institut.



A project called Ten Cities by the Goethe-Institut, Germany’s cultural representative abroad, juxtaposes European and African club cultures. The cultural work is aimed less at representation than at participation. “Art spaces, club culture and music can contribute to discovering and reconquering one’s own city,” says Gerriet Schulz, who curates the Ten Cities project together with Mahmoud Refat in Cairo. Schulz operated the WMF club in Berlin for twenty years, was one of the original techno and club pioneers when, after the fall of the wall, new opportunities arose in the centre of Germany’s largest city.

Like at the end of the GDR

Berlin and Cairo are not so easily compared, according to Schulz and Refat. About twenty million people live in Cairo, Africa’s largest city, but things in the city on the Nile are also changing rapidly. Globalization, democratization, many empty buildings in the city centre due to unprofitable rent laws – some of it recalls the situation at the end of the GDR. The revolution and toppling of Mubarak’s regime created a power vacuum in 2011 that neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the military has been able to definitively fill, and of which the cultural initiatives take advantage.

The military, which is under no democratic regulation and its leadership caste is controlled by about one third of the country’s economic planners and clans, is mainly busy defending its sinecures. President Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood must now secularly manage the country’s economic plight. So far they have shown themselves to be just as ideological about it as they are incapable. Their Islamist claim to power is rejected primarily by the third force of the nation, the revolutionary pro-democracy movement of Tahrir Square. It appears to have recovered somewhat from the shock of the 2012 election defeat.

Ten Cities co-curator Mahmoud Refat and his label 100 Copies are also located in downtown Cairo, ten minutes from Tahrir Square. The friendly, tall man in dreadlocks receives guests on the second floor of the slightly run-down looking colonial-age building on Talaat Harb Street. In his professionally equipped recording studio, Refat produces electronic music from Cairo and North Africa. He also composes theatre scores, was invited to Berlin for the Maerz Festival as a musician and was, of course, on Tahrir Square in 2011. He is one of the busy figures in the independent Cairo club and arts scene, which is ultimately limited to a few spaces. Every week or two, 100 Copies is transformed into a concert space: electronic music is performed free of charge to an urban audience that outwardly differs very little from that in Europe.


Olaf Bender and Carsten Nicolai of Diamond Version praise the uncomplicated collaboration with their Cairo co-parts. They had only four days to prepare for the concert at Rawabet Theater with the musicians from Cairo. Their full schedules allowed for no more; shortly thereafter they performed in New York and Zagreb. “We are all at the same level,” says Nicolai, “that makes it very easy to play music together.” Shortly beforehand, Bender had performed at the D-Caf Festival in Cairo as a Byetone. The Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF), created in 2012, according to its self-description aims for the “revival and reclamation of Downtown Cairo as a vibrant cultural centre.”

It is striking to experience the way that certain pop culture (and anti-authoritarian!) attitudes are so globally widespread today in some scenes. “All of us here are making a kind of globalized music,” says Bender, “the music serves as our universal language.” Nicolai speaks of a common ground that unites people across continents. “Of course there are local influences, but in many ways we are closer to one another than we know.”

Electronic clash downtown

This is clearly demonstrated at the Ten Cities concert at the Rawabet Theater. Chairs were removed and the hall quickly filled up with hundreds of young people. We can tell we are in downtown Cairo and not in a club in Buenos Aires or Berlin because of bottles of water rather than beer are going around. Only a few of the female audience are wearing headscarves. Admission is free and the mood is “chillaxed.” People were mobilized via the Internet and Facebook. Wetrobots, Bikya and Diamond Version finally enter the stage; in total seven men now stand in front of the tables with their computers.



The audience cheers as the fifty-minute electronic jam session begins. The electronic big band performs skilfully and very energetically. Nicolai and Bender lead it with distinctly recognizable Kraftwerk connotations. It is well received by the Cairo club youths, but is probably painful to the ears of the intelligence apparatus. Egypt is still not a free country. In 2012, 74 fans of Cairo’s Al-Ahly football club, the spearhead of the pro-democracy movement, were lynched in Port Said. After that, the Tahrir movement attempted to storm the ministry of the interior. Sexual assaults on female activists are the order of the day. What is new is that women who were raped on Tahrir Square report it publicly.

The media are generally under pressure. In April the comic book writer Magdy El-Shafee was temporarily arrested on charges of trying to kill three police officers during a demonstration. The charges were then changed to an alleged traffic violation. El-Shafee’s graphic novel Metro is still banned. There is no rule of law anywhere, corruption is everywhere; access to opportunities and prosperity remain exceedingly disparate. At the Mashrabia art gallery, the artist Hala Elkoussy is showing recent photos of the streets of Cairo. In the documentary Journey Around My Living Room she links these to places and objects from her childhood.

The megacity on the Nile is, depending on one’s point of view, a moloch buried under a sea of cars, “a jumble of high-rise apartment blocks arranged like an ugly row of broken teeth” (Jamal Mahjoub under his pseudonym Parker Bilal, The Golden Scales), or, in the act of photographic self-appropriation, an empty alleyway with a sleeping dog that one never finds in reality.

Courtesy of taz, in which this article appeared on 25 May 2013.