Ibrahim Ahmed - Laura El-Tantawy

Moderated by Julie Bonzon, 10 August 2020

JB: I wanted to address the similarities between your work, despite the fact that they look very different. Thinking about Ibrahim's 'quickly but carefully cross to the other side', which is a series of collages borrowing elements from family archives, and Laura's series 'In the Shadow of the Pyramids', I would be interested in hearing more about the relationship between your photographic practice and family members, such as the father figure and the grandmother. Ibrahim, why did you choose to work with this family archive and your father in particular?

IA: The title of the project you are referring to comes from the book Live and Die Like a Man by Farha Ghannam. In the internal work that I was doing, I began to recognize that the things that were instilled in me either didn't make sense or were no longer serving me. There was a limitation that I felt I couldn't break out of. Looking at the past was a way for me to navigate a possible present or future, beyond these constraints. I started unpacking the things that my father raised us on and became caught on a thread. For me, it was about unlearning things. My father was, in a sense, a deity—somebody I put on a pedestal, a hero if you will. I realized that I had to 'deconstruct' him at a certain point. The work 'burn what needs to be burned' involves looking at my current situation and recognizing that these things come from somewhere else. To me, this is about understanding 'masculine geographies', understanding their terrains and what I am working against. This is why I have a very specific curiosity about him (my father) as a figure. One example that I use a lot is that he disciplined us by making us work out (laughs). That was his way of punishing us if we did something. Also, when I was reading Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt and Wilson Chacko Jacob's book Working out Egypt, I recognized that there were colonial projects that my father was a part of.

LE: In many ways, there is a very strong parallel in both our journeys. We both left home to go and establish our identities elsewhere, and then we eventually came back home to rediscover ourselves, choosing different ways to do so. I turned my camera on the streets of Egypt, while he turned his camera on his own journey, specifically focusing on his father. What is interesting to me, in terms of masculinity and expectations around it, is that the work I did about the revolution and being on the streets has a very 'masculine' approach, while his work and the collages that explore identity through the body are quite different. You don't normally see men from our culture doing that, and you don't see women going out on the streets and exploring violence and telling their stories that way. My grandmother was definitely a grounding figure in my family. She was the roots; everybody in the household surrounded her as a particular figure. She symbolized generosity and everything associated with the idea of home. She was the person always calling me while I was abroad, saying 'come back home.’ When she passed away, suddenly the world shifted. I traveled back to Egypt and tried to establish a reconnection with home. Coming back also meant facing certain stereotypes about my roles and people's expectations; I was coming back single, in my late twenties, with ideas around family, marriage, and motherhood. All of these labels made people cast a particular eye on me. I felt different. Also, going out on the streets, there was always this question of where I was from. I felt that I had to reclaim and validate my identity as an Egyptian. The streets were really a place to assert, 'I am an Egyptian,' with conviction.

IA: I was raised overseas my whole life. When I came back to Egypt about six years ago, I was confronted with a very rigid idea and understanding of what 'Egyptianness' is. I feel like there is this very rigid Egyptian uniform; it is very militarized. People get indoctrinated by the system by the time they are eighteen, and it is interesting to me to see how government military protocols transfer into this Egyptian identity. Looking at family photographs and archives, I realized that this is what my father was raised on. Also, this 'Egyptianness' is constantly moving and shifting. Hollywood has taken over in Egypt; the idea of the ‘masculine hero’ is clearly prominent. Prior to British colonial intervention, this idea of manliness was very ambiguous in Egypt and shifted upon the creation of the new nation-state. To me, the question of 'where you are from' comes up a lot. It feels like rejection. We have a very complex history; we have been the center of so many empires that defining Egypt as just one thing and then rejecting anything slightly different from it is incredibly frustrating. Coming back to Egypt, I realized that to some extent, living in the United States, I sort of 'orientalized' myself. I realized when I came back to Egypt that this place was not what I thought it was.

LE: I relate to that. I am constantly surprised when I am in Egypt. When I was in the US, I felt curious and excited to come back home, but I had a very judgmental attitude towards Egypt. I thought that I was this more liberated person coming back into a very conservative and closed culture. I was actually coming back with my own judgments. When the revolution started in 2005, my perception of the country shifted. Now, the Egypt that I have come back to is one that intimidates me. The version of Egypt that I remember from my childhood feels very different. We are complicated people (Ibrahim and I) because we have two worlds embedded in us, and we are trying to find a middle ground. How to deal with that visually or artistically is something that interests me greatly.

JB: Listening to both of you talking about childhood, memories, and coming back to Egypt, I wonder what your expectations were and how you negotiated that photographically. Thinking about the notion of 'return', did you find what you were looking for?

LE: My childhood memories are mostly about family vacations and a feeling of being in a protected structure. Coming back, I felt that this structure had certainly been fractured because a strong figure in my family was no longer there. The cracks kept getting bigger as I realized how my siblings were not as close as they used to be, how the grandchildren were not as central, and all of that impacted my relationship with home and that sense of 'coming back'. I was not coming back to what I had left, so how do I compensate for that, and how do I fill that gap and reflect on it? When I was going out and taking pictures, I was trying to project certain words or emotions into the images I was making—ideas about chaos, loneliness, and solitude. You don't see a version of Egypt in my pictures with a sense of life where people are thriving and happy; you don't see anyone smiling in my pictures. I did have those images, but I chose not to include them in my book because that was not the version of Egypt that I was feeling. My work is about this journey and trying to reflect on it. I didn't have a particular image in mind of what I was coming back to.

IA: I knew that I was coming back to a colonized country. I didn't have romanticized expectations of what I was coming back to, and I did not necessarily come back to Egypt to find myself either. It was just a place where I became another face in the crowd. I wasn't this politicized body like in the United States, where I was seen as a representative of one or two billion Muslims or a representative of Egypt among one hundred million. In Egypt, I felt a level of autonomy to thrive; I didn't have to defend or justify my humanity anymore. I was offered some sort of invisibility. That is part of the reason why I decided to stay.

JB: I was struck by the notion of identity and more specifically reclaiming an identity in both of your works, and the daring attitude involved. How was your work received in Egypt and overseas? What audience did you have in mind when creating your work?

LE: When I created the work, I wasn't very conscious of the audience. I was making images that became a body of work, and the revolution certainly gave it a sense of urgency. The work, at the beginning, was just an excuse to use my camera to go out into the streets. In terms of reception, the project has been well received outside of Egypt, especially given its political impact—a woman from Egypt looking at Egypt during a time when the country was at the height of a huge political event. There were certain labels attached to it. In Egypt, I am not entirely sure what the reception was; the work hasn't been exhibited there.

IA: The only time I exhibited the work was in Rome. I realized in that moment that I had not really considered the audience; to me, the work was very much a personal and intimate journey. This exhibition in Rome made me realize that I wanted my audience to be on the continent, to be in Egypt. This is why I teamed up with Tintera Gallery. I felt that the work was better understood here. I haven't exhibited in Egypt yet, but people in my neighborhood constantly come to visit the studio and look at the work—the local blacksmith or the tailor, for example. How the work has been received has created a lot of interesting conversations. Looking at the poses, the tensions, and the constricted postures in my series of portraits, for many men it 'clicks' and they question why they have been raised this way. Outside the gallery in Rome, I saw a group of boys holding hands. I wonder at what age we shame men for being intimate with each other. In Egypt, there is this closeness between men; we lock arms, and in some parts of the country, men hold hands or lock pinkies, and it is not read as anything special. The nuances in my work are better understood in Egypt than when I exhibit overseas. Also, the North African male body is often sexualized or fetishized in the West. That is not what interests me at all; I am here to understand the complex effects of patriarchy on men.

LE: I have a few questions for you, Ibrahim. In what contexts do men come to your studio, and how does the conversation start? Was it intimidating to you in the beginning? How did you feel about having these conversations about your own vulnerabilities? Regarding the images, when you made the collages about your father, did you focus on your own experience, or were you inspired by what people had told you as well?

IA: I was scared at first when groups of young men started walking into the studio, because of my own imagination. But the moment I showed vulnerability, ironically, it opened up a space to discuss it. Men need to take the risk to show themselves; a lot of it is performance. I am strictly looking at what these images say to me, how they indicate something, and how they map the terrains of masculinity. I am interested in this act of weaving maps so that people can pull on threads at their own pace. But the minute your work gets out into the world and is not yours anymore, it is scary. Your work gets put into a mini package box. For instance, I don't like being solely defined as an 'Egyptian artist'. It's not that I don't claim 'Egyptianness', but I know what that means; it is a loaded term. People won't say 'German artist'; it's never a thing to bring someone's nationality into the framework of whiteness.

JB: Laura, what do you think of this notion of 'Egyptianness'?

LE: I feel that all these labels need to be redefined because everybody has a different idea of what 'Egyptianness' is. The Egyptian journey has been very different; we have been colonized, so we have these interferences in our identity. To some extent, we are still being colonized by the government we have and the ideologies that they impose through our educational system. The idea of 'Egyptianness' is one that needs to be liberated. There are so many cultures in Egypt, and their identities are all intertwined. The problem we have now is that we label people in a way that isolates them from a sense of solidarity. I think that everything and anything can be seen as Egyptian.

IA: I agree with you, Laura, in the sense that I don't think about 'Egyptianness', but I am interested in these 'schisms': 'Egyptianness', 'Americanness', and so on. These are made-up ideas, but people are holding on to these things, not letting them go. I believe that language creates culture, and culture creates reality. Depending on who you speak to in this country, their narrative around 'Egyptianness' varies. There are several realities and nuances in the experience. Within the Arabic language, there are thirteen words for 'friend' and twenty-four words for degrees of 'love'; how could there be only one definition of 'Egyptianness'? 'Egyptianness' is an alternative reality, beyond the capability and reach of the English language.

The transcription of this interview was made possible thanks to Le projet IMPACT by Xavier Gradoux & Jérôme Jacquin.