During the spring of 2020, with COVID-19 lockdowns, Cairenes took to flying kites over the city’s rooftops in the few hours before curfew time. They attached their cellphones to the kites to take snapshots of the city from above.
“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.
