Sidewalk Salon

Sidewalk Salon – 1001 street chairs of Cairo is an intimate portrait of Cairo, seen from the thousands of street chairs on its sidewalks and the people who occupy them.

These far from perfect, used chairs, which populate Cairo’s sidewalks, speak of the city from below. Combining Polaroid photography, interviews and texts in English and Arabic, Sidewalk Salon presents creative practices of design that occur on the sidewalk along with the unplanned interventions in the public space that give Cairo its distinctive character.

Organized in two sections – walks and series–, the book gives the reader a glimpse into our method of urban empiricism and our journeys on foot through the city, in which we documented street chairs by indexing on maps the locations of the seats photographed.  The series sections reveal common formal characteristics of street chairs, while shedding a light on multiple techniques of recycling and redesign that people use to repair and improve their seats. Some of those series group together particular types of seats like armchairs and sofas, or curious pairs of twin chairs also found regularly on the pavement. Other sequences focus on the life cycle of chairs, showing different phases of their decay—from their amputations to their final collapse—or the miracle of their recovery with the help of various prostheses.

Conceived, edited and introduced by Manar Moursi and David Puig, with texts by Yasser Abd al-Latif, Al-Taher Sharkawy, Maged Zaher, Mohamed al-Fakharany, Amira Hanafi and Malaka Badr.