Introduction

Aya approaches the archive as an index of relations, full of absence, presence, promise, relaying all the relations that bring the archive into being. She situates the conversation within an expanded notion of the materiality of archives, cities and index; mentioning Sinan Antun’s novel Fihris, which means Index in Arabic and published in English as Book of Collateral Damage (2019). Our podcast conversation begins in the cathedral ruins, before moving to the Chapel of Industry, followed by the archives under the nave, before and finishing with a brief addendum on the wooden naval panel.

Moving between the different materials between Coventry and Cairo, Aya brings her geo-poetic analysis of materials, including dust and concrete, to the conversation. Both cities are approached as urban palimpsests: places layered with history, memory, and political relationships. Buildings of desire, attachment, promise and dis-attachment are replete within an atlas of emotions. Aya’s place-based, situated understanding of where we live, walk and conduct scholarship, channels our imagination to desires, and the planning of futures. Coming from Cairo, a city which is also strangled by the ring road, she leads us to look inside and beyond the cathedral. We hear of how Aya often thinks with and alongside artists to alter and expand our relationship to space.

Aya mentions how as an outsider to Coventry, she found several points of connection in the city, not always without frictions. When, for example, the far right was rioting in various locations across the UK, she walked to the cathedral, where a message of multicultural solidarity (relayed by Canon Mary Gregory) provided an holding space. Aya’s discussion of radical artistic politics, in a colonial context, takes us to the camouflage artist John Hutton, and the British military headquarters in Cairo.

Biography

Dr Aya Nassar is an Assistant Professor at Durham University, as well as a British Academy Fellow, researching the topic ‘When the city stands still’ (2023-2025). She is part of the editorial team of Arab Urbanism, a bi-lingual open access platform that publishes on urban questions in the Arab World. Previously, she has co-convened the Warwick Political Geography group. She has co-authored the book Spon End: A Local Guide (2019) and many academic articles, including: ‘To be called forth by a speck of dust’ (2024) and ‘Geopoetics: Storytelling against mastery’ (2021), published in the academic journal Dialogues in Human Geography.

Aya Nassar is an interdisciplinary scholar situated between politics, urban and political geography, and middle east studies. She writes about questions of memory, archiving, (geo)poetics of space, infrastructure and affective and material aspects of cities. Her doctoral research included investigating the archives of national Egyptian architects who were designing plans for post-colonial/post-independence Cairo. Her post-doctoral research focused on the aesthetics and poetics used to represent and depict Arab cities after 2011, neighbourhood storytelling and memory in Coventry, as well as space and memory work in Egypt. She is guided by postcolonial frameworks and inspired by decolonial and feminist approaches in teaching and research: https://disembodiedterritories.com/Aya-Nassar

Podcast

Addendum:

Transcript

NIRMAL PUWAR: Welcome to another episode of the podcast Hear Here. My guest today is Dr Aya Nasser, who's travelled from Durham University, where she's an Assistant Professor in geography and has published widely on the materiality of cities, global cities, and cities in between. Right now, we're standing in the vast area of the ruins of Coventry Cathedral. As we stand here, we can feel and even sometimes smell the dust on these walls.

Aya, you've worked and published on dust and the materiality of geographies for so much of your scholarship. How did you come to this perspective in your research?

AYA NASSAR: Thank you so much, Nirmal, for having me here. It's a glorious sunny day in the Cathedral, and you can almost feel as if it weren't destroyed or brought into ruins. Now, interestingly, when I started thinking about dust, it wasn't at all in relation to Coventry. As you might know, most of my work is in Cairo, although I eventually also came to write a little bit on Coventry. We can speak about that later.

So, Cairo is a very dusty city, and it's a dusty city in a way that's slightly different from how we speak about Coventry as a dusty city. I'll tell you why in a minute. Cairo is in the middle of Egypt, in the middle of the desert. We get seasonal dust storms every spring. Actually, one is happening right now. It is very seasonal. It happens every year, and people always complain about the dust. It's almost impossible to get rid of dust or to fight it. Even if you try to fight it by vacuuming, by cleaning, you never really win.

So, it's something that is a nuisance. You complain about it. You live with it. You learn to live with it. It's very intimate. You breathe it. Often, it's causing, obviously, lots of breathing and other illnesses. It also lives with you and the home, but it's also a condition of the city. It's a condition of a city that tries to distance itself from the desert.

I came to it because I was interested in a particular episode of the city, that is, the city post-independence in the 1950s and 1960s. It's also an interesting time in Coventry, where there was a lot of ambition and a desire to build anew. So, there was a lot of architectural desire to put in plans for a new city that would come after formal independence. And at the same time, I was acutely aware that people were talking about the city during the period I was conducting my research, with a strong sense of disappointment that these plans and promises never came to be, that Cairo is this concrete, dusty jungle.

So, I went to the archives, and in the archives, you deal with materials that are always covered with dust. What is really interesting when you're working with archival material is that architects never really account for dust. They build in plants, they build in maquettes. These maquettes are usually white. They never really factored in; what are we going to do with the dust? The dust accumulates over maquettes and also builds up on the ruined buildings outside — buildings that were built and are now deteriorating or being demolished, or buildings that never really ever came to be.

For me, to think about dust, especially in relationship to Cairo and maybe probably for Coventry as well, is to think about that interplay between the desire to build and to keep and to preserve and almost the inevitability that things will materially wither away. Whether in a violent event like the destruction of the Cathedral that we're in, or the slow accumulation of dust, actually. If we decide to sit or touch, we’ll see the residue of last week's suits, dust, pollution, and the people who have been here, sat, and left behind sheds of their hair or clothes. It's that accumulation and weaving in, of all the heterogeneous human and non-human and ecological, but also historical, accumulations of material.

So, this is why I was drawn to dust. I think dust is an interesting material to think with, through the monumental, eventful destruction, such as the one that created the space that we're in today. But also the very slow accumulation of processes, of people leaving traces, of people wearing away, of bodies and matters rubbing against each other.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Incredible. The dust through time as a residue, as a trace of people, places and events. And now we're going to walk through the ruins over to the new Cathedral_._

[organ playing in the background] We've just walked through the nave to the Chapel of Industry, where there are these tall pillars of concrete leading up to this vast roof. Aya, having read your work and thought about how this space is constructed, I often wonder what Aya thinks of when she considers the concrete here or elsewhere.

[00:05:35]

AYA NASSAR: So, concrete is really interesting in relation to dust. It almost serves as the opposite of dust because concrete in the way that is used in modern architecture—and even cement broadly, in the way it’s used in modern city planning, the way it goes into everywhere, like how we create spaces, plans, architectures—what it promises is an element of endurance, unlike dust.

So, the material itself made loads of promises about how we can build higher, taller, for longer. In the context of the Cathedral itself, it promises something of durability that would stand against the rumination next door, I think.

Concrete is often something that people hate, and I knew that from my research in Egypt. People often term Cairo as the concrete jungle. I think it's a well-known thing that when the plans were put in for the modern Cathedral as opposed to the old one, it was critiqued as a concrete monstrosity. Often, not referring to the exact materials used in assembling a cathedral—such as stones, glass, and other elements—but rather to the sense of something monumental, grey, and not colourful, which may suck in light.

I think the design of this Cathedral is more ingenious than the term concrete or concrete monstrosity because there is a lot of interplay with light. Thinking with this material is to think of that interplay of attachments to matters and attachments to buildings. It’s asking, what promises do they furnish? And how we get disappointed with them, which is something that really interests me. How do we use this material as a vehicle to offload certain attachments, disappointments, as well as desires? What do we expect the building to be? How long will it live? Can it be recycled? The thing about concrete is that you cannot really recycle it. Once you demolish a concrete building, there's nothing you can do with it except have rubble.

A lot of these questions go into the materiality of the concrete—the coldness, the way it absorbs and emits light or the interplay with light and other materials. I find the pillars interesting because they seem to be floating, and they allow a very high ceiling, which was always a matter of debate, of course, with the construction of the Cathedral. Concrete is something that people hate or love to hate, but it also enables lots of experimentation, I think.

NIRMAL PUWAR: It's so interesting how you mentioned desire, attachment, promise and hope. As we stand in this circular Chapel of Industry, it was intended to be one of those places where the Cathedral was visually and spatially connected to the booming industrial city of the 1950s and 1960s.

And the chaplains of industry were out there in the city making connections, especially at a time when we know that people were migrating from many of the colonies, becoming ex-colonies. They were also working in the city and, of course, there were tensions. Therefore, they had a chaplain—Canon Berry—who actually worked with race and community relations.

As we look on the city today, it's a different moment. We can see new towers that have gone up for student accommodations in the private-public enterprise that the university has become. As you think about local and global connections in your work, moving between Cairo, Coventry and other places, and now you're in Newcastle, what leads you to reflect through and with these windows right now?

AYA NASSAR: That's a long conversation, and there are many parts to that. So, let’s think first about the Cairo, Coventry and Newcastle connection. These are three cities that are briefly stuck within that emotion of desire and disappointment, pride and disappointment.

[00:10:12]

There's an interesting thing that goes back to the Second World War that happened in Cairo. I was working on an archive of an architect, an urban planner. He published a paper—sort of a magazine article—after the Second World War, which reflected his disappointment that Cairo wasn't destroyed in the war.

For him, as an urban planner, this represents a very particular historical moment. But, for him, if Cairo was destroyed in the war like many of the other European cities, it would have given it an empty blanket, on which architects and designers could fix the problems of the city. Of course, the total opposite happened here in the UK, especially in Coventry, where the bombing of Coventry literally paved the way for total structuring and planning, not only of the Cathedral, but also of the wider city.

Planning and designing always invite a lot of hope about progress, modernity, and desires about the future through futuristic design [organ playing in the background]. From the tiniest bits like the construction of the space that we're in, to thinking about the primacy of cars or pedestrians or what kind of shopping people would do and how they would flow across the city and throughout the world.

Newcastle was one of those cities that experimented with these new ambitious plans, but it didn't go all the way, and that is really interesting. If you go to the city centre, you’ll see highways and pedestrian highways that stop halfway through, so you basically can see that process midway.

So, the connection between the three cities is really interesting because you have Cairo, which wasn't destroyed, and for some architects from the mid-20th century, that was a lost opportunity. Then, you have Newcastle, which left the relics of this modernist desire to plan halfway through—the student towers, the new buildings, and the shops. Here, you have Coventry, where lots of the plans were actually pulled through, and the tragic point is that they pull through because of the destruction that happened to the city. Throughout these three cities, you don't see any formula that worked. People deal with what the planners and the architects offer and create their own lives.

What I've always liked about the city is how easy it is to come to it as someone who's an outsider, how easy it is to settle, not necessarily to find a community in the small sense of the term but basically to find connections, to find flows, to find ways of being and living without an over-gratification of what that means, without making a big hype out of it. I think a key element of that was these flows of global industries coming in, not obviously without frictions. Of course, you, Nirmal, have written a lot about that in the past.

But, basically, there were flows of trades, flows of industries, several flows of migrating people coming and making a living and helping other people come and make a living as well, which in the current political moment is not to be taken for granted.

[organ continues to play in the background]

NIRMAL PUWAR: Yeah. And, if I can just go back to what you said in terms of the construction of the city in the post-war moment. We're here; we can see in the distance the ring road, as well as a big elephant swimming pool, which was also a massive fantasy, if you look at the plans for it. Now it’s stood empty for years, and it's costing the council.

I remember in a previous conversation when we were walking through the city, Aya, you mentioned that when you first came to Coventry on a coach, you saw the ring road.

AYA NASSAR: Yes, I come from a city that is also suffocated by a big ring road. It's very different in scale from the ring road that we have here in Coventry. When I first came into Coventry, the ring road and all the work around the rail station were ongoing. So, the ring road was really what people turned to at the time, with the concrete snake or the choking hole. You can see the city both within and outside the ring road.

Ring roads do different and interesting things in how you experience the city, especially whether you're driving or not. In Cairo, the establishment of the ring road in the late 1980s opened up the city for people who had never really seen parts of the city. The establishment of the ring road cut across several dense neighbourhoods, and people who would drive suddenly found out that they were living alongside several dense neighbourhoods that they had never really known about. That created a sort of moral panic about class differences, different forms of life, and what informality meant. That basically created a whole urban discourse about otherisation and others. The ring road itself created relationships of violence wherever it went, wherever it was established.

And that is not a past story. Until the present day, there are desires to create these highways that cut through the fabric of the city. There are always questions about what gets destroyed in the wake of that. In the case of Cairo, it is trees and cemeteries. I very well understand also that in the case of Coventry, there were also trees, neighbourhoods and older buildings. But as you say, the first thing that I saw when I came to Coventry from the airport by coach was the ring road. I think a couple of the first things you see are the Coventry Library and then the old little houses stuck between the ring road and the library.

[00:16:32]

NIRMAL PUWAR: In thinking about the global circulation, the flows and looking out, as well as looking into the Cathedral from this Chapel of Industry, what do you think a Cathedral could become for future making?

AYA NASSAR: I have a fond memory of the Cathedral as a place that always felt open and welcome, as opposed to other cathedrals I've been in. I came here last summer, around August, when there was this whole wave of race riots, that we thought—we hoped— wouldn't happen again. It was the first Saturday afterwards that I came here, and there was a clear message acknowledging that kind of violence was happening. I thought that was really important, as someone who is racialised in some ways, to see that at least my fears were acknowledged in this space, and there's an acknowledgement that something hurtful is happening across the world.

And the same thing has been happening over the past two years now. These are things that have been initiated by you, Nirmal. It’s like we’ve been working and living through a genocide of global magnitude. Through the multiple initiatives that have been happening in the Cathedral—and outside of the Cathedral, but in relation to it—it’s been really useful to stage conversations that bring in ecologies, relationships of activism, all rooted here in Coventry but thinking globally and outwardly, and what it means to be here while reflecting on global relationships of violence.

So having this space that welcomed that process—that staged films, documentaries, conversations, and planting initiatives—and allowed us to think about global flows and connections, in a place that has itself seen horrible destruction in the past and knows what that means… That doesn’t offer a bandage to cover over that hurt, but instead asks us to think carefully about what that means globally— I think that’s something hopeful. At the very least, it gives me hope that this space could be one oriented towards a future that grapples with these relationships.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Yes, thinking about the destruction, as you say, at a genocide scale in Gaza, and we've been trying and building solidarity so that we open ourselves to a reconciliation that's beyond here, but also connected to here…

[00:19:22]

Now we’re in the archive. We’re surrounded by books, maps, and photos. Aya, you often think with and alongside artists. If there is no limitation, what would you like to intervene with, in this space or in the nave or in the many chapels?

AYA NASSAR: So, yes, I've worked with several artists, and I usually take cues from them, rather than from the space itself. The artists I've worked with and who most inspire me are those who reconsider the materiality of the space and sort of rework it completely so that it develops into new forms and new shapes, and therefore alters our relationship to space.

So, in the case of the Cathedral, not necessarily the archive itself—although the archive is interesting—I often think about the elements. So, our conversation centred around dust and concrete, but I think about the four elements together: fire that destroyed the Cathedral, water that was scarce and therefore the Cathedral burned. Dust, sand, light, a plethora of elements that come into making the space. The thing about elements is that they are not determinants; they don't perform as we expect them to do. So basically, what the excesses of these elements can do is transform the space, maybe even detonate it altogether, not in a violent way, but in a way that allows us to think about expanding and contracting it.

I'm thinking here of a couple of artists I've worked with—either visually or as installation artists—who tend to work with the registers I’m most drawn to. One of them, whom I mentioned to you earlier, is Emma McNally. She just finished an exhibition in London called The Earth is Not Flat. Emma draws—that’s her main material, her main tool of trade, so to speak—and she also works with mapping. In that exhibition, she took all of her drawings and maps and mulched them together using Arabic gum. Then she painted over them with graphite, layer upon layer, so that they eventually looked like rocks. So, she was essentially transforming the mark itself—moving from the legibility and authority that a map usually carries to something that decomposes back into its elemental form.

But, without losing the traces that were made in the process. I think in sites that try to tell a historical story about harm, and healing connections and disconnections, it's important not to lose a sense of that tracing in whatever creative, transformative artwork and intervention. So, this is what I would be interested in broadly. I think, going back to the archive, for us as social scientists broadly, it is the tool of our trade. There's nothing more exciting than sitting in an archive and being promised that you'll discover something. I think that promise always plays in, especially among academics, but also many artists and intellectuals. It promises that you'll find something or a detail that you didn't know before, and then bring it to light. That is the allure of the archive.

And we know, of course, that archives are problematic. What people decide to keep or discard is always a political decision, one that is bound by its context and historical process. So, yeah, look at these boxes, they indicate an index of all that was preserved, but also everything else that was discarded. So, that interplay between presence and absence is always something that is fascinating about archives. Not that archives will ever deliver on their promise; it never restores a story, or our relationship to a place, I think. But they always bring in that uneasy question of absence, of traces of how you can recombine a story out of fragments of traces, which brings us back, actually, to the discussion about dust.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Yes, you have a very expanding notion of archives. As you said, you work with different elements, and that includes buildings, infrastructures, bodies, as well as paper reconstituted. So, for you, what can an archive become?

[00:24:05]

AYA NASSAR: I've been recently rethinking my fascination with the archive itself, to think about an archive not as an accumulation of traces—no matter how incomplete they are—but as an index, in the sense that it offers an index of relations, but also an indexical of all the relationships that brought this archive into being.

I think this idea is actually from a novel. There is an Iraqi novelist called Sinan Antun, and he wrote a novel by that title, Fihris in Arabic. It was translated into English as The Book of Collateral Damage, but Fihris translates immediately as an index. It’s a novel that has a very Walter Benjaminian reference. The book is about many things, but the line I'm interested in is a set of different random objects, and each object tells its own story until the moment it ceases to exist. These are objects that got fragmented during a detonation or a bombing.

And every object is trying to trace the histories, the stories, the positions—the indexical relationships—that created them initially, and then fragmented them in that moment of destruction. In this sense, they are an index of the space, but also indexical of the harm that has happened to the space. The novel is set in Baghdad in 2003, during the Iraqi invasion. I think of an archive in this way—not as something that promises knowledge, but as something that points toward different relationships that came into being. And then we can begin to ask questions about those relationships.

So, that is an archive in a traditional sense, like the one that we're in now, and it's actually very exciting. You can see my eyes wandering around all the documents, but also all the other expanded notions of the archives, for example, people like to talk about the city as an archive, the body as an archive. I think we should respect the work of archivists of traditional archives, as we're thinking about these expansions of the notions of the archive.

What is fundamental here is the discomfort that we find in the archive. There's a writer I really love, and she talks about archives as a scene of crime. She's inspired by Sadiya Hartman's work, in the sense that when you enter the archive, you're faced with an unnamed, deceased body and the quest. Your role here is not to figure out exactly what happened, but also to be an advocate for that body, because the body will not speak.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Being an advocate, constituting and maybe following the traces of the index is fascinating because this podcast was going to be called Index. When I've shared the word index at events, people often get very technical and start arguing over which index, whereas I actually think of it in the sense of my influences from ethnomethodology, whereby there's an indexicality to life.

[00:27:26]

And while we've been here—as you said—your eyes are everywhere, and we almost didn’t begin the podcast on time because we were just looking through what's on the shelf. I pulled down this book on John Hutton for you, and the reason I did was because although there's a lot of published work on the glass, the artist, the architect—in fact, most of the material focuses on that part of the Cathedral’s life—what often goes unexamined is how these artists, many of them, were also in Egypt.

John Hutton, for example, served in World War II, specifically in Cairo. I'm sitting here reading those words, and it all comes back to me. I mean, there’s an indexicality in memory as well, especially after all the collaborations we go through in life.

And John Hutton, who famously created the West Screen, as a visual link between the old and the new Cathedral, was trained as a camouflage officer, where there were airfields, fuel dumps, all camouflaged and sometimes disastrous encounters occurred with those. In Cairo, it’s said he painted ragged boys and veiled women. He was in the camouflage team, referred to as the 21 Army Group Camouflage Team, and they were deployed in Syria and Palestine. Then, they travelled to France, Belgium, and Germany, where he first met Captain Basil Spence, as he was referred to, and their friendship began.

He went on to Head the Camouflage School in Surrey, and he also requested Spence to be its Deputy Head. Interestingly, while these places are mentioned—Cairo, Palestine, Syria—the colonial context of that relationship is not at the forefront of people's minds. People get lost in the artist's life rather than thinking about how that biography is itself a strong trace of the Empire.

And as we've opened this book, you're looking at page 46. What's come to your attention, Aya?

AYA NASSAR: Initially, I thought that was interesting. That’s what Nirmal wanted me to talk about— Cairo and that connection, and why think about Coventry Cathedral from the vantage point of Cairo? I didn't know about John Hutton being in Egypt, though I was not surprised. At the time, many British and European artists went to Egypt for different reasons. So, Hutton's account is a story of someone who was drafted in the war and then was sent to Egypt, as Egypt at the time was related to the British occupation in a complex way. I don't think we need to go into it, but it was formally independent, yet not fully independent, because it had to serve its role in the war.

So many soldiers came to Egypt and were stationed there. Also, it was a time in which there was a lot of persecution in Europe, so a lot of artists left Europe and came to places where they could practice things with a lot less censorship, and one of the central sites was Cairo at that time. So, there was a strong surrealist movement in Egypt. It was a place of exile where people could congregate, perhaps experiment freely outside of censorship. So, it was a cosmopolitan hub and not just a victim of colonisation. This is where many intellectuals and artists gathered.

[00:31:44]

So, I started flipping through the pages because, as we started talking about dust, I mentioned that there's no British soldier who came to Egypt during the war who didn't complain about the dust. This was something I found repeatedly across all the archival notes. Indeed, yeah, Hutton didn't disappoint. At some point, he made a comment about the dust storm and the dust, and what I thought was interesting was how he described airborne dust as a concealing carpet.

That is interesting from an artistic point of view, as a metaphor for light, visuality, and communication, but also, obviously, as a camouflage officer. Dust always serves as a metaphor for something that is going to disrupt our relationship to knowledge. It's an interference, a disruption, a veiling. It counters our assumptions of knowing as associated with light. I tend to think about that with the glasswork as something that plays in with light and shadow, to reveal something rather than conceal it, or to play with the elements of revealing and concealing.

But as I was pondering over that idea of dust, what followed through was really interesting because the account also tells not just of Hutton staying in Egypt and drawing a Middle Eastern Orientalist or whatever experimentations there, but there were also elements of strong connections that actually tell a very different story about what that time globally felt like.

For instance, on page 47, the text describes how he met Henri Curiel. Henri Curiel is a very famous communist activist in Egypt and globally. He's someone who was connected to global solidarity movements. He is very famous for supporting the Algerian War of Independence. His family home was given to the Algerian embassy after independence, as a form of support.

Here, Henri Curiel was merely an asterisk and some details in the footnote, but in reality he was a key node in the communist relationships and resistance movements of the time. Through Curiel, we know that he was introduced to an Egyptian artist named El-Telmisany. Again, El-Telmisany was really at the centre of alternative art, creative and artistic experimentation at the time.

There's nothing here that states the relationships or the effects of this relationship, but I would probably claim that this must have been fundamental to changing the networks, movements and the intellectual currents of the time. That particular moment was a centre for alternative artists and creative practices, especially for those grappling with the relationship between art and politics during a globally turbulent period.

So, this is what I mean by the archive as indexical. It's one page—or two pages, we haven't even read through the whole book, but they are indexical of relations, of not only colonialism, but also of solidarities, of creativities that happen outside of the centres of where you think they will happen.

NIRMAL PUWAR: That coexistence is fascinating. So, although John Hutton is connected to the army headquarters and the war scenes, as well as the camouflage scenes, you're taken towards other scenes, such as alternative artistic scenes that also manifest. They're usually not on the page, but you do the work of bringing those collaborations and solidarities in motion into the picture of how we situate an artist.

AYA NASSAR: I think that's interesting. You brought us back to the presence of the military in Cairo because the headquarters of the British troops in Cairo is a really interesting place. I mean, it's well known, but maybe it's not written here in the archive, but the headquarters was a central place. It is now known as Tahrir Square, where the revolution took place. But the British were also stationed elsewhere, particularly in the east of the city. They had another headquarters, where Nasr City is now.

Now, these two sites are the sites that the architect I mentioned earlier, Sayed Karim, was really interested in planning and redesigning. He was not alone; there were multiple architects interested in re-planning downtown Tahrir Square, which is a perpetual issue—how to rewrite that commemorative place in the city centre. Historically, the city centre was inhabited and used by a largely European, westernised population, though of course that’s a simplification. It was also the part of the city that was burned down just before the Officers’ Movement that launched the main struggle for independence from British control. It was the site of many student protests, of political activism, and it remained that way until perhaps a decade ago. The other British military site, in the east of Cairo, was transformed during the 1950s and 60s into a planned residential neighbourhood with new governmental buildings.

What I'm trying to suggest here is that these locations and sites are constantly being written and overwritten. They become, as we often say in teaching, urban palimpsests: places layered with history, memory, and political relationships.

So, yeah, and I assume Coventry is like Cairo in this respect, of course—clearing and layering and sedimentation of ground.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Your work enables us to offer an approach for de-layering and re-layering in many ways. And, your work takes us in so many directions. You've just ignited our imagination here in the archives, and as we've walked through different parts of the Cathedral. I'd like to say thank you for bringing yourself, your expertise into our conversation. I'm actually looking forward to it continuing.

Addendum

NIRMAL PUWAR: We've walked along the rather curvy corridor from the archives to the Navy Room, and in prominence here is this very big wooden panel with gold lettering of place names and dates. What do you notice here, Aya?

AYA NASSAR: I mean, walking in, you see several dates, and Egypt is very prominent on the top of the second list. The year next to it is 1801, and that would be the year when the British occupation of Egypt started. So here, it just appears as one year among many—there’s 1704 before it, 1805 after it, 1840 next to Syria—but 1801 is a pivotal moment in Egyptian history. That occupation lasted until 1954.

So yeah, it feels odd to have that date and place smudged between the list of other dates and places, whereas it's really an eventful conjunction in Egyptian history.

NIRMAL PUWAR: It does bring in a lot of connections and indexicalities to global geopolitical histories, connected to the armed forces. I think we'll need another day to dwell on that.

References

Brentnall, Margaret (1987) John Hutton: Artist and Glass Engraver, Philadelphia Art Alliance Press.

British Military Headquarters in Cairo: https://www.britishmilitaryhistory.co.uk/docs-middle-east-1930-1947-british-troops-egypt-1930-45/ So we are all good, then 🙂. It is not Nasr City, but close by.

The Art et Liberte group: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/magazine-tate-liverpool-egypt-surrealism-anna-wallace-thompson and this https://sulfur-surrealist-jungle.com/2020/05/30/destabilizing-modernity-kamel-telmisanys-surrealist-unrest-by-may-telmissany/

Henri Curiel: https://jacobin.com/2024/09/henri-curiel-egyptian-communism-jews

Concrete and highway dreams in Newcastle: https://www.farrellcentre.org.uk/concrete-dreams/ and https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/feb/07/brave-new-world-newcastle-dream-for-vertical-city