When I reflect on urban art projects and the development of what is considered street art as opposed to graffiti (and vandalism) it occurs to me that the ever larger murals painted by a handful of internationally-operating artists contribute to gentrification and look pretty much the same all over the globe. Through images online, these works often get more views abroad than they do at home. According to architect Joe Halligan, it is impossible to design something in the public sphere without being aware that most people will only ever see it through images (Halligan, in FitzGerald, 2020). As more and more people live in cities, addressing questions of identity, belonging, and trust in the context of urban space is crucial for more inclusive cities and societies (Kern, 2020). Urban interventions can be a very direct means to creatively question, change, or reconnect the relation between people and the spaces they inhabit.

One such intervention is Augmented Walls, an independently-produced hybrid street art project created in February 2021 in Al Khalifa, a district in historic Cairo, Egypt. In this visual essay I would like to reflect on the precursors to this project and the way in which on-site art production and digital technologies in urban interventions may create connections spanning various urban narratives and different groups of people. The aim of Augmented Walls was to create artworks in a way that shows the connections between the rich history of Al Khalifa and its present, and to create added value for the residents as much as for visitors.

Finding the right words

My involvement in urban art production started in 2013 with a series of large-scale paste ups depicting images of women in the streets of Cairo. I was thrilled to see my work appear prominently in public space, but at the same time I was concerned and insecure about its reception, even though no one knew I was the author. Moreover, considering the charged atmosphere of the aftermath of the revolution that had taken place that year, I also felt intimidated by how easily fellow Egyptian street artists seemed to be communicating with their audience. In the process, I became acutely aware of the communication aspect of my own work. Putting art up for everyone to see is easy, but in order for passers-by to really connect to what you have to say, you need to speak their language and I just was not sure if I had the right words.

In many cases, understanding or enjoying art (in museums) requires familiarity with cultural and visual codes, this being a deliberate strategy to effectively exclude or limit viewership. As Raicovic (2021: n.p.) notes, ‘art museums [become] remote palaces and temples-filled with objects not closely associated with the life of the people who were asked to get pleasure and profit from them, and so arranged and administered as to make them seem still more remote.’ For my part, with every new project I reflect on how to create works in the urban environment that are not only an expression of my artistic vision, but are also meaningful to the people who see these works every day.

Since 2013, I have been involved in several projects in Al Khalifa through Al Athar Lina (‘The Heritage is Ours’) initiative of the MEGAWRA Built Environment Collective.⁠¹ Al Athar Lina is based on the idea that the built heritage of Cairo belongs to its people and that in order to preserve heritage, people have to feel that it is indispensable as a source of livelihood and spirituality, as a connection to their past, and as a place of memory, entertainment, service, or culture. In 2013, I was approached by Al Athar Lina to install two large-scale murals featuring maps of the area (Figure 1). The idea was to encourage tourists coming to visit the Ahmed Ibn Tulun Mosque (the oldest intact mosque in Cairo) and the adjacent Gayer Anderson Museum to also go and see the less famous local historic sites, workshops, street food outlets and shops. The local character, narrow streets and lack of awareness of the history of the urban fabric of Al Khalifa were discouraging people from visiting the area. To many people, clearly designated, time-frozen tourist areas such as Al Moaz Street or the Khan el-Khalili bazaar seem more friendly than the bustling streets of Al Khalifa. The idea was to see if the maps could change that, providing a space of encounter rather than exhibition and thereby challenging the typical dynamics of the tourist industry. As Marco D'Eramo has asserted, ‘tourism kills the city, for it erases its urbanity and de-activates its function as a contact multiplier.’ (D'Eramo, 2021: n.p.)

While working on the Athar Lina project I was asked by a local cafe owner to prepare a design for the exterior of his cafe. The image I created features women sitting in an ahwa (traditional street cafe), smoking sheesha (hookah) and playing backgammon with the Shajar al Durr Mausoleum, a nearby historic monument, in the background (Figure 2). Women very rarely hang out at local cafes as public space is the domain of men. I wondered how the image would be received – as a provocation or as a spin of reality? It turned out the cafe owner Aa'm Mostafa found the image and its resonance progressive. When I came back to visit, Mostafa not only showed me an interview he gave to a Cairo newspaper on the occasion of International Women's Day, he also urged me to restore some pieces of flaked-off paint. He told me people come to his cafe just to see the mural. Over time I have added more elements to it (Figure 3).

Legends of the House of the Cretan Woman

As I was decorating the cafe, a patch of urban wasteland that had become a huge garbage dump, was being redesigned by MEGAWRA BEC into a children's football field. They invited me to create a mural on a building overseeing this location (Figure 4). This project turned out to be a starting point for me in developing a visual language based on local imagery and connecting this with my own drawings of the area. For this design, I adapted one of the illustrations in the book Legends of the House of the Cretan Woman. In this book, the author – a British officer named Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson Pasha – documents the culture of Al Khalifa and retells its legends. Between 1935 and 1942, Gayer-Anderson lived in what is today the Gayer-Anderson Museum: two connected houses dating from the Mamluk Empire,⁠² one of which was inhabited in former times by a wealthy Muslim woman from Crete. The museum is a stone's throw from the football field.

I wanted to bring the stories and myths from the book⁠³ back to the streets they came from. Among locals, these stories and their visual language are well known. One day, a shoemaker from the area heard me and a friend talk about a jinn (a ghost) from one of the stories living under a big stone. He began telling us about the jinns living in the street and how he communicates with them. The images from the book are being used by MEGAWRA BEC as colouring pages for local children so they too are capable of recognising them.

Figures 5, 6+, 7 & 8+. Murals by Agnes Michalczyk and their augmented reality effects. Al Khalifa, Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photographs ©Agnes Michalczyk & Florence Mohy.Figures 5, 6+, 7 & 8+. Murals by Agnes Michalczyk and their augmented reality effects. Al Khalifa, Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photographs ©Agnes Michalczyk & Florence Mohy.Figures 5, 6+, 7 & 8+. Murals by Agnes Michalczyk and their augmented reality effects. Al Khalifa, Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photographs ©Agnes Michalczyk & Florence Mohy.Figures 5, 6+, 7 & 8+. Murals by Agnes Michalczyk and their augmented reality effects. Al Khalifa, Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photographs ©Agnes Michalczyk & Florence Mohy.Figures 5, 6+, 7 & 8+. Murals by Agnes Michalczyk and their augmented reality effects. Al Khalifa, Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photographs ©Agnes Michalczyk & Florence Mohy.Figures 5, 6+, 7 & 8+. Murals by Agnes Michalczyk and their augmented reality effects. Al Khalifa, Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photographs ©Agnes Michalczyk & Florence Mohy.Figures 5, 6+, 7 & 8+. Murals by Agnes Michalczyk and their augmented reality effects. Al Khalifa, Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photographs ©Agnes Michalczyk & Florence Mohy.Figures 5, 6+, 7 & 8+. Murals by Agnes Michalczyk and their augmented reality effects. Al Khalifa, Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photographs ©Agnes Michalczyk & Florence Mohy.

Augmented Walls

My most recent project in Al Khalifa – Augmented Walls – brought together my interest in visual narratives from Cairo's streets, the experience I have gained from different mural projects, and my focus on developing images in conversation with community members and the owners of the houses I paint on.⁠⁴ Augmented reality (AR) offers novel ways of experiencing the city: it allows for creating virtual artworks that can be released by anchors⁠⁵ or geolocation, and offers various possibilities for interaction (Figures 5, 6, 7 & 8) – from viewing only to playing games or connecting to online content such as videos or sound. The kind of content released depends on the creativity and skillset of the creator and is not limited by what is possible in real space. AR links together the practice of mapping and storytelling, creating narratives people can follow and engage with.

Figure 9+. Al Khalifa locals and visitors discover a mural by Agnes Michalczyk. Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photograph ©Agnes Michalczyk.Figure 10. Al Khalifa locals discuss the production of a mural by Agnes Michalczyk. Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photograph ©Florence Mohy.Figure 11+. Mural by Agnes Michalczyk, Al Khalifa, Cairo, Egypt, 2021. Photograph ©Florence Mohy.

On four walls around a closed loop of small streets surrounding the historic Mosque of Ahmad Bey Kohya, I painted four murals, combining elements from the old drawings in Legends of the House of the Cretan Woman with contemporary scenes from the streets of Al Khalifa. Using visuals familiar to local residents as a way to directly address them as the primary public of these works of art follows Miwon Kwon's claim that ‘the central objective of community-based site specificity is the creation of a work in which members of a community – as simultaneously viewer/spectator, audience, public, and referential subject – will see and recognise themselves in the work, not so much in the sense of being critically implicated but of being affirmatively pictured or validated’. (Kwon, 2004: 95) For each mural, I created a layer of virtual illustration and animation with the user-friendly Artivive app. The use of different technologies helped raise interest in these works as people were keen to discover what was embedded within each image. The connections between the real and the virtual world and between stories from the past and the present prompted interaction between local residents and outside visitors (Figure 9).

Public space dominated by men

I find myself lucky to have worked on several different projects in the same place over the past nine years because it has given me a chance to be in touch with locals whose feedback I have integrated into the augmented reality part of the project (Figure 10). Although residents took pride in the stories and imagery from Legends of the House of the Cretan Woman, there were concerns raised by some men who said they felt underrepresented and asked why I had only painted women (Figure 11). This response was not unexpected in a culture where public space is dominated by men. Women are nowhere near as visible and are often even worried to have their images displayed publicly.

The public images of women that these men are used to viewing are generic and usually feature foreign women in ads. One man asked me why I had drawn women wearing a hijab as there were already plenty of such women in the street. These were not representations of women that these men wanted to see. This view contrasted with the feedback I got from children – most of whom were excited to see things they recognise and make them happy, such as a tuk tuk, a pigeon house, and a kite (Figure 12).

Another complaint was voiced by some elderly people who felt the black and white images were depressing. A few weeks after the project was finished, however, a woman stopped me in the street telling me how much she liked the ‘funny’ AR animations I had made in colour.

Taking pride in history and heritage is an important part of Egyptian identity and addressing this is a way to appeal to all segments of society. Given how rigidly divided and highly hierarchal Egyptian society is, it is hard to bring people from different social groups together on equal standing. This divide is plainly visible in public space, or rather lack thereof, as access to it is in many cases strictly policed. David Harvey writes that ‘the right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our hearts desire.’ (Harvey, 2001:3) Urban art projects such as Augmented Walls have the potential to imagine such change and bring a diverse group of people together in public space.

Augmented reality technologies combined with more traditional urban art may result in work that is artistically relevant and socially impactful at the same time. Oftentimes the success or failure of community-based participatory projects is measured by looking at the degree of participation it achieves, which is often lacking when the work is too artist-driven. On the other hand, there is the idea that only critical or provocative strategies can be artistically relevant (Bishop, 2012), yet these are by and large incompatible with socially-engaged practice (which in turn often becomes purely decorative or complacent). The question of how the different modalities may interact – bringing together real and virtual space and creating a so-called mixed reality – and what the potential of such interactions is for socially-oriented art projects, is worthy of further exploration.

Heritage preservation through augmented reality

Augmented Walls was a unique opportunity to find out if hybrid – i.e. AR – urban interventions have the potential to create connections between the present and the past in a way that keeps history alive. There are ethical challenges facing artists who aim to work with heritage in places where people are living and working, without setting in motion the displacement of these people and without turning these places into tourist attractions. Through my involvement in MEGAWRA BEC's projects, I became aware of the issues related to heritage preservation and the dire toll it often takes on communities in historic areas. In his book The World in a Selfie: an Inquiry into the Tourist Age, Marco D'Eramo explains how historic areas may be turned into tourist attractions and how ‹tourism becomes an instrument of separation between residents and visitors’. (D'Eramo, 2021: n.p.) Finding a way to express yourself meaningfully through art, to connect people in socially constructive ways, and to create a dialogue between heritage and contemporary art requires artistic flexibility.

By creating a tour along the walls on Google Maps (a more modern form of my map project from almost a decade ago), I have tried to mimic a treasure hunt which encourages people to venture into parts of town they might otherwise not go to. This stage of the project is also part of my artistic research into the potential of AR technology in creating a virtual tour guide of the area and the visitors centre. Augmented reality offers a futuristic aspect to the blend, it is a way to tell a story without seeming stuck in the past. The four walls I painted are in a street than runs parallel to the Ibn Tulun Mosque. Previously, people came solely to admire this world-class monument, now they come also with the express purpose of seeing the art in the surrounding alleyways.

Note: Figures with a ‘+’ can be viewed through the Artivive application to show the augmented layer of the murals: artivive.com