Hovering Decoys

Inspiration

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Hovering Decoys

Cairo’s skyline has been dominated by billboards hovering over its buildings, streets, and green spaces. Cairenes are followed by billboards almost everywhere they go now. Sometimes even from the windows of their homes they can reach out with their arms and touch one. These billboards advertise for all kinds of products. But it is quite obvious how most of the billboards over the past years have been advertising for gated communities in Egypt’s suburbs and coastal towns. Hovering Decoys is addressing the issue of the vast number of billboards which follow Cairenes wherever they go, sometimes invading the privacy of their homes. Insensitively provoking those who have no homes, live in slums, or illegal settlements. Alluring people by promoting foreign sceneries and lifestyles. Using all sorts of marketing techniques to decoy people into moving away from the heart of the city, to the suburbs.

Marketing campaigns often show the “old Cairo” as chaotic, polluted, and dodgy. They also often use greenery as a selling point, to lure customers into moving to the suburbs which are being built in the desert. They also often promote using imagery that resemble European and North American lifestyles to convince people that they are moving somewhere “elite”. This kind of advertising affects the social identity of the whole society as the rich move to gated communities and feel more superior and detached from reality, the poor feel more segregated and uncared for. Such projects also affects our economy as many buy properties and keep them locked as an investment. Not to mention the environmental harms, such as the vast grass surfaces and the golf courses that require huge amounts of water daily to be sustained, while Egypt is facing serious water issues. No other product quite affect people’s lives after they have bought it like real-estate products do, which is why this is a matter that requires our attention.

Reflecting on this year’s Biennale’s topic, How will we live together?: It has been rather evident that the way Cairo is expanding is only bringing people apart, creating more barriers between them, and tampering with their collective social identity. Hovering Decoys aims to spark a conversation, and raise awareness, about our ways of living. About how even if different, we can still live together, and how architecture is a tool to achieve that.

The entrance of the pavilion tries to create a sense of mystery and intrigue with its unwelcoming form, alluring visitors with the neons. The inside of the billboard is meant to resemble how detached the advertised projects usually are from reality. The infinite illusion the mirrors create is a metaphor for how disoriented billboards make people feel. As for the design of the billboard, it is minimal as opposed to how billboard designs usually are as to not distract the visitors away from the message. One of the first things one notices about the billboard is its uneven rectangular shape, which is how people usually see billboards from their cars or homes, they see them somehow distorted. There is text and a symbol of a house which indicates that this is a real-estate ad. The text is borrowed from numerous slogans that real-estate marketing campaigns use on billboards in Egypt. The text was put together that way to allow visitors to see the pattern that repeats itself, the promises, and the lack of unique design selling points that actually help improve people’s lives using architecture, and not just grass and foreign lifestyles. The whole exhibition is monochromatic to resemble the lack of greys in what market has to offer. As for the color of the billboard, white was chosen to maximize the effect of the neon on the experience of the visitors.

So how will we live together?

Living together requires a certain level of communication between all parties involved in this process, or any other process for that matter. Each party has responsibilities that must be fulfilled to achieve a level of satisfaction for the developer, the architect, and the end user. We hope that this year’s pavilion should raise questions about the direction which housing projects have been heading to in our country. Housing should bring us all together, without walls or barriers, without harming our environment, and most importantly without marginalising classes. The way to do that is to hear one another and communicate our concerns. The results of the workshops that we will organise between developers, architects, and end-users, will be exhibited as part of the open call participations. The open call itself will be a form of living together, hearing one another, allowing for different people from different backgrounds to give their say on the matter, as we believe it affects everyone.