Kites, Billboards and Bridges” is a research project in which visual artist Azza Ezzat collaborated with geographer Aya Nassar to trace objects, old and new, that populated Cairo skies during COVID-19 lockdown.

The project and the artwork was funded by a Research Development Fund Grant from the Geography Department in Durham University, UK (2020-2021).

The project follows material and affective infrastructure of the air, and asks what gets extended, suspended and disrupted during the COVID-19 Cairo Curfew of 2020. How do social and material infrastructures extend, suspend and respond to the glitch of a curfew? And in what ways does this glitch sit within ongoing and ordinary inhabiting the city? Thinking with aerial infrastructures and the temporal disruption of a curfew allows us to examine how urban interruptions, absences, emptiness, silences are lived through.

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