This past week has left the venerable nonprofit Townhouse Gallery shaken. Though the attempted demolition of its building at 10 Nabrawy Street in Cairo has been halted, the gallery is faced with months of work ahead to secure its future. Operating since 1998, Townhouse is known for drawing international artists and thinkers to Egypt, and nurturing an emerging network of support for Egyptian artists through its library and archive, cultural salons, theater, and nonprofit incubator programs. Their presentation of cutting-edge, often political art in a space that welcomes and serves Egyptians of every class has invited rancor from reactionaries, and over the past week, Townhouse and its neighbors were nearly displaced permanently when local police forcibly evicted them and then threatened to demolish the property after a section had collapsed. The process of securing protection for the 19th-century building in order to list it as a heritage site and proceed with restoration is underway, a process that was only made possible because of widespread community protests against the demolition. Says William Wells, Townhouse’s co-founder and director, “Given that we are in the center of the city and demonstrations have begun again after a two-year absence, we must act quickly.” The convergence of many different social classes in support of preserving the mixed-use building illustrates how the arts can operate as a site for citizenship where such spaces are hard to come by. The threat against Townhouse is a lesson in how liberal development can function as cover for acts of cultural erasure by conservative political interests—a trend observed in cities across the globe.

Townhouse Gallery, 10 Nabrawy Street, Cairo, Egypt, c. 2011. Courtesy of Townhouse Gallery.

On Wednesday, April 6, a section of the historic building that houses Townhouse partially collapsed. No one was injured, and staff salvaged what equipment and archives they could from the rubble and resolved to rebuild. At 8 a.m. on Saturday, April 9, police arrived and declared the building condemned, but did not produce any documentation supporting that finding. Townhouse is situated within the Mechanics’ district, and the working-class neighbors (who have long defended the space from government censors) turned out in large numbers to stop the demolition. Mido Sadek, a former Townhouse employee, described the scene at the time: “They were supposed to just clear the rubble from the collapsed part of the Townhouse building, but the army [said] they will demolish the remaining three-fourths of the building that is still stable. Some families will sleep on the street tonight.” Residents were able to initiate a government review process that Sunday to list their building as a protected heritage site; however, the police returned on Monday and began to physically dismantle and destroy architectural elements, removing doors and smashing windows and tile, while forcibly vacating the remaining occupied units. Townhouse media and communication officer Karim Moselhi described how, “It was really shocking to see how the laws regarding heritage were completely being disregarded, and on top of that, it was devastating to see the authorities evicting those families and shop owners without notice.” Sadek asked, “Who made this decision without informing the owner or tenants of the building? How was this decided so quickly, and why would it be implemented on a weekend? There are a lot of unanswered questions.” On Wednesday, April 13, in response to continued public pressure, the demolition order was reversed by a specialized delegation of government representatives and engineers. Quite a bit of work is still required to make the building habitable and to restore the damage created by police and by the original collapse. Townhouse has temporarily relocated to its adjacent Factory and Rawabet spaces, and has set up a co-working space for staff and community organizers to complete the architectural and cultural surveys of 10 Nabrawy Street that must be submitted to secure the building’s protection. Meanwhile, the building’s six resident families remain homeless.

Townhouse Gallery after relocation to Factory/Rawabet spaces, April 16, 2016. Courtesy of Townhouse Gallery.

Townhouse Gallery is a space for public discourse and a platform for democratic action. In 2011, its proximity to Tahrir Square situated Townhouse at the center of the pro-democracy movement, and since that time the gallery has been a gathering point for Cairo’s increasingly disaffected young creative workers, as the euphoria of a political revolution has been replaced with the malaise of a failing state. Townhouse and its staff have been targeted with violence before, during the Morsi regime in 2012, when Wells was brutally beaten in his home. The chaos and dysfunction of Egyptian systems and infrastructure since that time has created an environment where abuse of power by local officials can go unchecked. “Another round of this sick and sad game,” Alexandra Stock, a former Townhouse curator, commented. “Total breakdown of law.” The space has reopened multiple times after forced closures, most recently in late December 2015 when the recent attacks on Townhouse by government entities began with a government-mandated closure and suspension of their operating permits.

Community assists with evacuation of Townhouse library and archives, April 9, 2016. Courtesy of Townhouse Gallery.

The gallery’s ability to serve a broad cross-section of the Cairo public has been equally threatened by financial challenges due to the continuing instability of the Egyptian economy. Despite Kafkaesque bureaucratic dead ends and denials, Townhouse staff had, this past February, negotiated permission to resume operations and ultimately to reopen. Meanwhile, they had addressed funding woes by securing a partnership with real-estate developer SODIC that would provide corporate underwriting for Townhouse’s downtown spaces in exchange for gallery programming sited at SODIC’s Westown development, a gated community far from the socially mixed community of downtown. Another developer, Al-Ismaelia for Real Estate Development, owns the buildings adjacent to 10 Nabrawy Street, including the one housing the satellite spaces into which Townhouse has temporarily relocated. Al-Ismaelia is promoting a plan to redevelop much of downtown Cairo by positioning itself as a developer concerned with preserving the local architectural character, retaining the facades of heritage buildings from the Khedival era (of which the Nabrawy Street building is one), with modernized interiors. Like SODIC, Al-Ismaelia has underwritten contemporary art in Cairo, co-founding the city’s Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival and supporting the Cairo Documenta, an independent exhibition. Al-Ismaelia currently owns twenty buildings in the downtown area, most of them purchased over the past two decades from family owners who maintained their properties to varying degrees through years of public neglect, only to be bought out as the neighborhood is “improved.” This pattern is familiar for downtown revitalizations in cities worldwide, and may explain the claims by some local residents that Al-Ismaelia is behind the push to demolish 10 Nabrawy Street. In Egypt as elsewhere, there is money to be made housing young, middle-class urbanites while displacing working people from the city center.

Community assists with evacuation of Townhouse library and archives, April 9, 2016. Courtesy of Townhouse Gallery.

Tenacity is a hallmark of experimental art venues, and Townhouse would continue its work in artistic innovation, civic activism, and skills building even without the preservation of their current exhibition and library spaces. The more pressing question is whether the gallery can maintain its broadly accessible character and site. High-end developments on the city’s periphery aren’t available for meaningful engagement within a cross-section of the population in the way that a building in the heart of the city is, provided that the city center can be preserved as a diverse social space. The global trend of displacing working-class residents from high-density urban centers by demolishing their homes and businesses and replacing them with luxury investment properties, many unoccupied, entombs once-vibrant neighborhoods. The money might be Chinese, German, or Saudi; the city could be Los Angeles, Warsaw, or Cairo. Once the transformation is complete, even the most radical art becomes window-dressing.

Emmet Byrne. Illustration for Mn Artists and Walker Art Center, n.d.

It is significant that the common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an undefined present. — Raymond Williams, The Country and The City

I think about Theocritus a lot these days. Working from the Library of Alexandria in the third century BCE, this Sicilian-born poet was part of a collective effort to build the largest storehouse of knowledge his civilization had yet known. In the midst of this pre-modern, pre-internet project of information aggregation, Theocritus harnessed those texts towards the creation of an enduring kind of cultural and political ars poetica.

Theocritus sat in the halls of the Library and wrote poems—intricately metrical, densely referential—that utilized everyday dialogue to express a complex, national mythos. The presence of this body of work, alternately referred to as the Bucolics or Idylls, can be felt throughout our contemporary experience. In the arts, we might refer to Theocritus as the father of the pastoral genre; in political and cultural spheres, we could point to him as one of the first to put into critical terms a kind of spatial pathology that has continued to persist for two millennia: the notion of center and periphery.

These Idylls operate as a series of dialogues between paired speakers (goatherds, shepherds, nymphs, Pan, etc.), all of which are set against the backdrop of an idealized rural landscape, Arcadia. The brooks echo with the eloquent speech of these men (always men), and an orderly and peaceful flock organizes around their song. Well-turned verse is likened to sound husbandry, which in turn parallels the ideal and orderly organization of the nation. Pastoral scholar Paul Alpers coined this relationship the “representative anecdote”: how the shepherd stands in for the Greek citizen, how the cultivated landscape spreads out in abundance like a well-ordered nation. The Idylls offered a lush political matrix of anxiety and aspiration, achieved, as William Empson famously wrote, by “putting the complex into the simple.” That received tradition continues even now through a thousand avenues, from national parks to new country, from Marfa to farm-to-table to pancake breakfasts along the campaign trail in Iowa.

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untitled (mattress #11), 2010. Archival Inkjet Print. 30 x 40 inches.

The instability of vanity is perhaps one of visual art’s greatest selling point. And, in an understated way, when derelict man-made objects and places are pushed to the boundaries of their own self contained and easily understood offensiveness, they often transform into something beautiful. Scott Jarrett’s recent work aggregates the refuse of urban life to create reductive montages that are both surreal and magical. While Andy Goldsworthy meticulously curates what nature has provided, Scott Jarrett uses the remnants of city dwellers to provide moments in which the understood reality of place must recalibrate and exist in a secondary—albeit curated— dimension.

The notion of vacancy in Jarrett’s work is perhaps in part what drives the soporific quality of the installations which are ultimately presented as photographs. Jarrett seeks out ghostly locales and uses the emptiness to his advantage—piling white buckets past a boarded building and pushing a used mattress unapologetically against the window of an abandoned repair shop—situations that would lose their power in a world more populated.

untitled (mattress 7), 2010. Archival Inkjet Print. 40 x 30 inches.

The photographs begin to build a loosely qualitative narrative that is resonant with individual urban journeys as well as the notion of home. When understood as a whole the work begins to address a social consciousness rendered around historical absence, memory and loss.

Scott Jarrett received his M.F.A. in studio art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited internationally, including most recently, the 2010 International Sculpture Exhibition of Outstanding Art Graduates in Beijing, China.