University of Cambridge: Discarded history. “How the discovery and study of ancient deeds, fables, letters, magical amulets, contracts and lists in a sacred storeroom created unparalleled engagement with a forgotten chapter of Jewish history.”
Washington Post: Saving The Sounds Of An Ancient City. “For the past several years, Youssef Sherif, 28, and Nehal Ezz, 26, have wandered the Egyptian capital in search of the cries of street vendors, the tap tap tap of metal workers in their shops, the cacophony of chaotic traffic. Their goal is to capture in recordings what Cairo sounds like — right here, right now — before these noises disappear. They are collecting the sounds to share on an Instagram account and eventually hope to establish a searchable database of sounds.”
New York Times: Cairo Badly Needed a Detox. Lockdown Supplied One, at a Steep Price.. “Three months of lockdown slowed its pulse, stripped its grit and exposed a new side to a weary city. But without the noise, bustle and grind, was it really Cairo?”
Definitely one I’ll be mulling over for a while: Why bother archiving if we can’t change our own perceptions? “Visual archiving has become a ubiquitous vocation in Cairo in recent years. From workshops on how to read our pasts, to works that take the archive as their basis, to attempts to propose counter-narratives of traumatic events, the acts of gathering, annotating and examining images have become a national obsession. It’s a common view that archiving is a way to resist a monopolization of history, and this is partly why it has become so prevalent. But because we often pre-read an image before seeing it — especially if we know it comes from a conflict zone — archiving can also help reduce images to mere catalysts or ‘templates.’”
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