Hermann Huber, images from 'Cairo's Zabbaleen', 2007.
A few months ago I wrote about Hermann Huber's 'T I R I N G', a video documenting the fall and rise, figuratively speaking, of an early 20th century department store in downtown Cairo through the contemplation of the building's central staircase. The architectural conceit gave structure to the confluence of psychogeography, economic history, post-colonial cultural representation, and the fluidly changing spatial biographies of the site through what remains. A curiosity around the idea of re-construction, of re-appropriation, seemed fundamental to the project, of seeing, without touching, what essence may be stripped behind the particulars by time's erosion.
This video was just one expression of the young Austrian artist's two-year experience immersing himself in the social life of Cairo. An even more recent result of his time there is the visually stunning 'Cairos Zabbaleen' book, a revealing look at a usually invisible subject that, in tune with the aforementioned project, appropriates for a living: the so-called 'rubbish people' living in the city's biggest slum, a people who turn out to be the world's biggest recycling community.
Situated outside Cairo's ancient grounds, Huber's photographs document the daily way of life for the trawling Zabbaleen, a hereditary group of Coptic Christian garbage collectors residing in mostly Muslim Egypt since the 1950s, and socially restricted by their occupation and in danger of extinction. The images combine portraits of the young, old, and animal inhabitants of this filtering and purifying 'city' outside the city, embedded within the endlessly detailed landscape of neatly organized cardboard and tenaciously pervasive plastics, of unwanted domestic props paradoxically caught in a sort of utilitarian afterlife between the avenues made by a land-art-like sedimentation of refuse. They say a lot about the dignity of a space and explore the inheritance of a rather possibly ancient milieu in transition, a space we could assume was categorized as a non-place by the local authorities until recently, and whose inhabitants seen as non-entities.
Trying to explain the identity of this tribe-like social group was a significant aspect of Huber's project. "Every portraited person is mentioned with his name in the backside of the book in Arabic - this was very important for me because within Cairo they are called the invisible army and I wanted their real names in their language", the artist explains.
Rifling through the images we see a group of people perfectly at home in such an extraordinary, metaphoric environment, living and breathing a self-sufficient air, whether it be sitting by a group of bagged material, standing, model-like, between archives of stacked board, or, at times even, melding into the mosaic of their environment through the colours and inherent weariness of their garb. There is something ancient about the manual element to their labour and age-old demeanour, underscoring somehow their day-to-day contact with the detritus of modernity. An ancient place filled with vestiges of the present: "Their site at the bottom of the Muqattam cliff is the oldest site in Cairo in the city center-if you look close on one of the pictures you see in the cliff the format of the quarters which were broken off for the pyramids. The particular picture I mean is the one where you see the cartonage quarters in one line which are basically the size of the stonequarters of the pyramids!"
There is a hint at the possibility that self-sufficiency is not self-elected: around them, the ominous skyline of the boundary wall erected by the Egyptian government. As Wael Salah Fahmi (Associate Professor of Urbanism at the Architecture Department - Helwan University in Cairo) writes in the introduction to Huber's new book, "recycles up to 80% of the daily 6000 tons of waste produced by the Cairenes everyday [...] (yet whose livelihood) is jeopardized by the official privatization of solid waste services through contracts with technology-intensive multinational corporations [...] removing access to their chief economic asset, waste garbage [...] (a situation) exacerbated by an official policy of moving the Zabbaleen and their waste sorting, recovery, trading and recycling activities further out of the city".
Whether this has anything to do with an explosion of rubbish quantities in excess of previous amounts or has to do with the exploitation of controlled labour caught in another time, it's troubling that here, one man's rubbish is not only another man's treasure, but also holds the key to the former and the latter's potential disappearance.
The book version of 'Cairo's Zabbaleen' was recently launched at PULSE in Miami and is available here. The photos will be on show in Buenos Aires between 6 March and 12 April at the CCC Centro Cultural de la Cooperacion, Avenida Corrientes 1543, Ciudad de Buenos Aires,Argentina.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
HERMAN HUBER, 'CAIRO'S ZABBALEEN'
With essays by Wael Fahmi and Angela Stief
German/English
Eikon Sonderdruck #14, 2007
Hardcover, 64 pages
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