A new public art project is unfolding the shadows of Egypt’s great Pyramids of Giza. Creative agency and urban art producer DUCO is expanding their portfolio near the soon-to-opened Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). In early 2020, DUCO spotted an opportunity and proposed the Grand Egyptian Museum Public Art Cultural Tourism (GEMPACT) to welcome more color and creativity into the community by facilitating murals in the growing area. GEMPACT’s first installment took shape at the start of September 2021, when Brazilian art duo Acidum Project enlivened ten concrete walls with their vivid storytelling.
Sponsored by the Embassy of Brazil in Cairo, Acidum Project painted in the city following a long trip painting in Beirut, Lebanon. The duo, whose members include Robézio Marqs and Tereza Dequinta, spent the better part of five days leading a team to create a mural measuring 100 square-meters with assistance from their manager Pedro Diógenes (Cave). A quilt of colorful, geometric figures unfolds along Cairo-Alexandria Highway, where it will be seen by thousands of motorists and visitors to the future GEM daily. The mural is painted on “a handful of permanent concrete traffic block separators for the ongoing construction of Cairo Metro new lines,” the project’s press release states. The Egyptian National Authority for Tunnels (NAT) contributed this industrial canvas, which they own.
Fortaleza-based Acidum Project started off in 2006, building a practice that experiments across boundaries from muralism and graffiti to audio visual projects and exhibitions. Their hyper-flat work gains true depth in concept, drawing from a cross-cultural canon of storytelling devices for subject matter. Across surfaces, every artwork by Acidum Project includes a character and an overarching whimsy–the building blocks of storytelling. Viewers instinctively fill in the gaps.
Painting amongst the existential dichotomy of around-the-clock traffic while the ubiquitous pyramids loomed in actuality pushed Acidum Project’s work to new frenzy. In an Instagram post, the duo wrote that this mural uses “vibrant colors to represent cultural elements from Brazil and Egypt, incorporated into a landscape that includes the Pyramids, the Cairo-Alexandria Highway and the future museum.” Their gesture is perhaps one of the nicest offerings a traveling international public artist can make, especially at a site of such core human significance–a last wonder of our ancient roots. To celebrate multiplicity in modern cultures with authentic panache.
Public art remains a nuanced business. One website about the impending GEM museum run by travel blogger John Nicholson gives a full timeline of the GEM’s lifespan, which started in 2002 when the Egyptian government “announced a worldwide competition for the design of a new museum complex to house, display, and preserve some of the world’s greatest ancient treasures.” They laid a ceremonial foundation stone the next month, but “monumental” delays set in by 2005, compounded by the Arab Spring in 2011. “Following the restabilization of the government in 2014 and the preservation of that stability ever since, the project soon got back on track and construction resumed with the help of international loans,” the site continues.
“As part of envisioning a sustainable road map for the project continuity, a selection of embassies in Cairo shall be invited to participate and fund further public art activities with an objective to deliver a welcome message from GEM to the world,” DUCO Creative & Managing Director Hassan Ismail states in the press release. GEMPACT holds the potential to deliver an international, open-air art gallery to a universally significant location at a time of immense transition–in fact, partially because of it. Transition is the name of the game in most public art, precisely because it’s outside. That’s what makes the Pyramids so awe-inspiringly legendary. Stay tuned for more celebration on the streets of Cairo.
Special thanks to Fernanda Mansur Tansini (head of Cultural Affairs at the Embassy of Brazil in Cairo) who had a significant role in realizing this project.
Acidum Project: website | instagram
DUCO: website | instagram
