City of Fragments: Ruins, Archiving and Memory in Contemporary Cairo

Amid Cairo’s sweeping urban transformations, marked by demolitions, forced displacements, and the erasure of familiar cityscapes, this workshop examines what it means to archive and document the lived experiences and histories that are under threat of being lost. Here, archiving is not merely a preservation of heritage; it becomes a site of resistance, where the absence and dislocation of memory itself bear witness to the forces of erasure at work. In this context, the workshop will engage the question of how to document not only the visible loss but also the intangible—sensory experiences, emotional attachments, and the subjective landscapes of memory that traditional archives often overlook.