Time and fragmentary politics in Cairo: Rethinking the ‘event’ through Kaya Behkalam’s Augmented Archive

Abstract

What is the aftermath of an uprising in a city? How do cities contain the remains of ‘the event’? This article addresses these questions through a focus on German visual artist Kaya Behkalam’s Augmented Archive project. Described as a ‘digital art and research project’, The Augmented Archive is a phone app that presents an archive of urban space in Cairo during the 2011 uprising and its aftermath. Utilising GPS technology, augmented reality, and video streaming, the app leads the user through the city’s past, present and future. As users navigate Cairo through the app, they are presented with videos recorded in the same place at a time now passed, evoking the heady, hopeful, but also violent days of revolution and counter-revolution. Users are also invited to upload their own video content to the app. The Augmented Archive is therefore a palimpsest; past, present and future overlay and speak to one another. By exploring the Augmented Archive, this article considers the implications the app has on our understanding of time and temporality in relation to urban space in the aftermath of large-scale political events. Navigating the city through the app can lead to a disjuncture in the way we experience time. The Augmented Archive brings to the fore the way(s) in which the past continues to live in the present. In doing so, I argue, the app presents a critique of chronological, linear notions of time, and offers itself as an archive where multiple temporalities can coexist.

Introduction

It is now over a decade since the uprisings that took place across several Arab countries, events that removed from power leaders previously assumed to be unmovable. These were also events that gripped the attentions and imaginations of people worldwide. But the legacy of these revolutionary moments, at least in popular accounts and in large swathes of geographical and social science literature, is too frequently assessed as one of failure and missed opportunities. Indeed, it would be difficult to argue otherwise, and my intention is not to offer a reading of the uprisings as a success: the socio-economic and political situations in the countries affected have largely become even more precarious than they were prior to the uprisings, and there persists a general mood of despair in Cairo and across Egypt. Rather, I want to suggest that there is critical value in studying the uprisings as uprisings, they still have something to tell us about the politics of time and its passing. To do so, I “scale down” our view, away from the macro level of the state and towards the city. In the case of this article, that means scaling down from a focus on the Egyptian State and its complexities, and towards the city of Cairo ¹ . By disrupting the state-centric view of politics which privileges the view of some actors over others, scaling down to the city allows us to glean the kinds of politics that remain after the ‘event’, as well as how ‘ordinary’ actors may continue to appropriate space and use it in novel ways, thereby enacting their right to the city (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968], Harvey, 2008; Purcell, 2013).

Specifically, I am interested in the fragments, traces, and remnants of the past that remain in the present in the face of attempts to conceal, erase, and forget such large-scale “events”. Indeed, if we are to move away from linear temporality, can we still talk of “remnants”, or are they still of the urban spaces in which they took place? I explore these themes through a focus on visual artist Kaya Behkalam’s Augmented Archive project. The Augmented Archive is a mobile phone app that presents an archive of urban space in Cairo. Utilising GPS technology, augmented reality, and video streaming, the app leads the user through the city’s past, present and (perhaps) future. As users navigate Cairo through the app, they are presented with videos recorded in the same place at a time now passed. Users are also invited to upload their own video content to the app. The Augmented Archive is therefore a palimpsest of sorts; past, present overlayed and speaking to one another. It also invites the user to speculate and imagine possible futures. Behkalam, a German visual artist, was based in Cairo at the time he developed the app for his practice-based PhD and was heavily influenced by Walter Benjamin’s writings on city life, particularly his unfinished Arcades Project (1999 [1982]). Behkalam, like Benjamin, is interested in exploring fragments of urban life and how they might help us in rethinking the function of the archive, away from repositories of defeat and towards a potentially subversive site, from a fixed point in time/space to a more fluid, affective archive.

The article also speaks against the current trend in much of the literature on the Arab Uprisings that emphasises failure (see for instance Ketchley, 2017, Panta, 2022; Bishara, 2022; Brown, 2013). Rather, what I am interested in here is how depictions of “success” or “failure” of a political event, such as an uprising, contain within them a particular judgement or reference to time. We speak of ‘before’ and ‘after’ wars, what we did ‘during’ moments of political upheaval. This stems from approaches to time as a linear, chronological succession of events, understood as Chronos (quantitatively measurable time) and Kairos (time as ruptural event). As I will show in this article, the Chronos/Kairos conception have become important elements of early Greek metaphysics and subsequent theological thought regarding the arrival of a messianic figure. It was writers such as Walter Benjamin who would later imbue Kairos with a radical political potential. Revolutions, therefore, become seen as Kairos, a monumental moment where history can be altered and made.

But it is not always so self-evident. Political events, particularly those with a large magnitude such as revolutions and uprisings, bring with them a new awareness of time and its passing; The ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ tending to blur and the boundaries between the two becoming less clear-cut. To the ends of moving beyond the binaries of success/failure, hope/despair, and the triumphalist certainties that come with them, I am interested in what gets left behind from these uprisings, what sort of fragments of politics are still discernible after the event has seemingly and abruptly ended and encourage us to be more attuned to the mess (Squire, 2013) that is often central to the study of political change. Space itself becomes a way of temporalizing the uprising and its aftermath with Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the uprising, and its environs return to being “normal” spaces, no longer imbued with the same political charge they once were. This return to “normal” was conducted violently, and Tahrir Square has been the site for recent “renovation” plans that erase the physical traces of revolution (Middle East Eye, 2020). The article is, therefore, inspired by Scott’s concern with ‘temporality of the aftermaths of political catastrophe, the temporal disjunctures involved in living on in the wake of past political time, amid the ruins’ (2014: 2). This article is also a contribution to Sabry and Khalil’s (2019: 4) contention that the Arab Uprisings offered ‘the possibility for a new temporal configuration’, how multiple temporalities can persist after “the event” has passed, how these multiple temporalities manifest spatially and to speculate on the politics that could emerge from such an approach.

The article proceeds in four sections. The first section reviews the theme of temporalities and the Arab uprisings, noting a particular emphasis on a linear, chronological sense of time – an understanding which results in confident assessments of failure. Here, I discuss in more detail the conceptions of time as Chronos/Kairos as ways of reading social life. As a response, in the second section I draw on recent writing in Geography, such as Ingram (2019), Merriman (2012), and Ash et al. (2023) that consider ‘the event’ as having its own forms of temporality and spatiality. The third section then moves on to discuss the place of the archive as an agent of splitting up time, that allows for certain events to be past, to have ended, and, consequently, to foreclose the possibility to view what is left behind from such events. Here, I bring in Behkalam’s Augmented Archive project, describing the rationale behind it, and exploring the political potentialities of the project’s temporal blurring. Drawing on autoethnographic and walking methods, I also describe my own experience in navigating the app during stays in Cairo. By way of Walter Benjamin’s work in the Arcades Project, in the fourth section I connect the app to literature in geography on fragments, offering possible ways of reinterpreting memory and the past as political tools of disruption, rather than of melancholic nostalgia. In conclusion, I explicate the wider contributions the article makes to the study of the political geography of the Egyptian Uprising and political events more broadly.

The politics of time, failure, and the Egyptian uprising

A common thread running through much of the popular and scholarly works on the Arab uprisings of 2011 is a narrative of failure and missed opportunities; disappointment and despair are the norm. The initial enthusiasm that met the start of the uprisings – that, finally, the Arabic-speaking world was about to experience a process of democratisation (Gerges, 2013) – quickly waned. As authoritarianism reinvigorated itself in some countries, civil wars and general political unrest erupted, while others experienced total state collapse, in some cases simultaneously. This led to a return of the so-called ‘authoritarian resilience’ paradigm in an attempt to explain these developments (El-Issawi and Cavatorta, 2020; Heydemann and Leenders, 2011). Other, more comparative works have focused on the role of different actors – militaries (Kandil, 2012), trade unions (Beinin, 2015), political parties (Cavatorta and Storm, 2018) – in the trajectories of those respective countries’ political transitions. Fawaz Gerges, writing in as early as 2013, recognised that ‘a chorus of voices has already declared that the Arab Spring is either over or has already turned to a darkening winter and that the region has long seemed like ‘infertile soil for democracy’’ (2013: 24). Works focusing on Egypt exemplified this shift in research. Almost as soon as the military took power in 2013, the tone of analysis shifted towards declarations of the uprising’s failure (Brown, 2013) and a ‘determinist argument that the military was plotting to rule all along’ (El-Ghobashy, 2021: 30). This should not be read as a defence of the military institution, but rather a critique of the ways in which the uprising’s trajectory has been addressed in relevant literature. Other debates have centred on whether Egypt experienced a revolution at all, whether it was a more limited uprising, or what Asef Bayat has called ‘reformist revolutions’ (2017), and what it says about our overall study of revolutions and political change (see, for instance, Allinson, 2019; El-Ghobashy, 2021).

Common across this work is a view of revolutions as bounded and time-limited events. This itself can tell us something about the way in which time figures in studies of political space. As Kimberly Hutchings (2008: 5) explicates, there exist, implicitly and explicitly, two broad conceptions of time in ‘the realm of social life itself, and in the ways in which that life is explained and judged’: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos represents time as a quantitively measurable phenomenon, characterised by the inevitable cycles of individual life and death. Kairos, meanwhile, refers to time as ‘a transformational time of action [wherein] the certainty of death and decay is challenged (Hutchings, 2008:5). Kairos, therefore, represents time in which a ‘qualitative event is seen to create, arrest or change time rather than simply endure it’ (Rao, 2019: 301). It is time in human hands, where the path of history could be given purpose. Chronos and Kairos are deeply embedded within theology and early Greek metaphysical thought (see e.g., Joronen and Griffiths, 2019). In classical Greek thought, Kairos was understood in relation to place, specifically a ‘proper’ place that in turn foreclosed the liberatory possibility of Kairos as a ruptural event (Boer, 2013; Joronen and Griffiths, 2019). Later theological approaches then connected Kairos to a period of waiting for the emergence of a messianic figure. These works, therefore, saw a radical potentiality to Kairos that later became important in the writings of influential figures such as Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Martin Heidegger, among others.

Revolutions and uprisings, seen as monumental moments of upheaval, represent time as Kairos, where all possibilities remain open and “history can be made.” It is also vital for the theories of world history, giving us an ability to tell stories about events by dividing time up between past, present, and future. It becomes possible to ‘divide the past into specific periods, to make direct comparison between events at the same time or at different times, to make judgments about the sameness or novelty of now as opposed to then, and to speculate about the near or distant future’ (Hutchings, 2008: 6). In the case of Egypt, such a rendering of time and ‘event’ underpins a narrative of initial rupture, followed by an authoritarian resurgence, leading ultimately to failure. Here lies a key point. Any description of a “state of things” contains within it a reference to time. A “state of things” presents itself as final, precluding the possibility of other “states of things.” Jacques Rancière (2011: n.p.) argues that references to time act in a way of excluding and separating, through the ‘very simple separation of the present and past’. A statement such as “times have changed” may seem innocuous enough, but it implies a kind of impossibility. Rancière is worth quoting at length here:

‘“Times have changed” does not simply mean that certain things have disappeared. It means that they have become impossible, no longer belonging to what the new times make possible. The empirical idea of time as a succession of moments has been substituted by an idea of time as a set of possibilities. “Times have changed” means: “this or that is no longer possible”. And what a particular state of things readily presents as impossible is, quite simply, the possibility of changing the state of things. That impossibility thus works as an interdiction: there are things you can no longer do, ideas in which you can no longer believe, futures that you can no longer imagine. “You cannot” clearly means: “you must not”’ (2011: n.p).

There is a danger, then, of underestimating the radical potential of Kairos, or of downplaying the power-relations from which Kairos may emerge. As Joronen and Griffiths (2019: 72) tell us ‘the turning moments of kairos may become entangled in completely different politics than those of the ontological discussions of Benjamin, Agamben and others’. For his part, Braun (2014: 61–62) highlights how contemporary forms of urban governance connects Kairos to ‘a static time of liberal polity (Chronos) to the end of maintaining capitalism’s ecological contradictions’. From this perspective, even that literature which has discussed Egypt’s uprising as a ruptural event, a time of Kairos, has too often used the lens of Kairos to highlight the failure of the movement, an event that came and went. In other words, it relegates the rupture to other – by no means less important – issues such as democratisation and accountability for past crimes. In the context of Egypt’s uprising, the failure is due to the inability to result in some form of liberal democratic rule; the imagined ‘end’ of any political movement (Hom, 2016). But perhaps more damaging than the inability to realise some kind of democratic rule has been the psychological trauma resulting from the resurgence of authoritarian rule. Nouri Gana (2018: 121) distils this sentiment well when arguing that it was the aftermath of the defeat, or what he calls the afteraffect: the defeat ‘was and continues to be experienced and relived as an irreversible destiny—as a continually retraumatizing re-memory and reenactment of the foreclosure of a possible future, or worse, the foreclosure of the very possibility of a future’.

However, work in queer geographies, for example, has been valuable in teaching us that failure can be a productive force, and that standards of successes are often rooted in hegemonic forms of masculinity (Halberstam, 2011). In the context of the Arab Uprisings, Walid el Houri calls on us to move beyond the binary of failure/success and that failure itself may not be an ending, but a constitutive part of a process of transformation, a constant narrative that is never truly sutured and where everyday practices and unspectacular events are no less important than the spectacular elements of a revolutionary ‘aesthetics’ such as street battles and demonstrations’ (2018: 78). By focusing only on failure, and the “end results” of the Egyptian uprising foreclose the possibility of considering how the uprising impacted the identities and experiences of those who took part in it.

Part of the challenge involved in rethinking our approach to time involves a reconsideration of the ‘event’ as a lens through which Kairos is studied. Recent moves in geography have been helpful here. Merriman (2012: 13) argues that human geographers should ‘seek to study how social and cultural phenomena unfold in both space and time, with the processual enactments of events co-producing multiple, open space-times or time-spaces’. The ‘event’ takes on an explanatory power and a means through space, power and politics can be analysed. For instance, Marston et al. (2005: 423) argue that ‘it is here, in the middle of the event […] that one finds the production of social space’. Taking their cue from Deleuzeian understandings of the event, these readings have sought to approach the ‘event’ as open-ended rather than bounded, and indeterminate rather than fixed. In his work exploring British art in response to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Ingram (2019: 17) tells us that ‘it is not possible to specify with precision of finality what any particular event (including its name and spatio-temporal parameters) is’. Ingram then later argues that events have traditionally been understood in relation to absolute space-time: ‘the boundaries of events can be established temporally with reference to their beginning, duration and conclusion and spatially in terms of their extents’ (2019: 23). However, this reading of events requires a detached, third-person perspective akin to Haraway’s ‘god trick’, the perspective under the guise of neutrality that in fact hides a specific position (Haraway, 1988). Likewise, Klinke (2012) sees this perspective as a form of geopolitics that ‘carves up [history] into neat periods, thereby placing the geopolitician in the superior position of he who knows time’ (675, emphasis in original).

Time is, therefore, intimately implicated in the acts of narrating and writing that make ‘events’ legible and meaningful. Nonetheless, resistance is ever possible and ever-present, and there are other forms of temporality and other forms of the archive. Rancière is once again insightful here, particularly his reminder that “dissentious” forms of temporality continue to exist in opposition to dominant temporality. Rancière’s approach is to articulate a conceptualisation of time that is not progressive, i.e. not built around the succession of events but the coexistence of times (Rancière, 2011, see also Fajardo, 2020). For Rancière, dissentious temporalities take two forms: intervals and interruptions. Intervals are ‘created when individuals and collectives renegotiate the ways in which they adjust their own time to the division and rhythms of domination’ (2011: n.p.). Rancière gives the example of artisans in the 19^th century taking advantage of the acceleration and stoppages in work to pursue times of leisure, alternative temporalities unsanctioned by their masters. A second form of dissentious temporality can take are interruptions. These are ‘moments when one of the social machines that structure the time of domination break down and stop’ (Rancière, 2011: n.p.). These can be moments when the “machine” breaks down or glitches (Sakr, 2023). There are also those moments when people take to the streets to demand an end to authorities’ exploitation. Rancière suggests that intervals and interruptions can converge, that interruptions, for example not be considered ephemeral outbursts after which the “normal” state of affairs returns. The placing of several times into the same time, of ‘living as equals in the world of inequality’ (Rancière, 2011: n.p.), is the very essence of emancipation.

The archive and splitting of time

In this section, I shift attention to the archive as that agent which splits time and renders the ‘event’ as in the past. The archive, furthermore, is that which declares the conditions for a particular ‘event’ as no longer possible. However, following on from the discussion above, resistance is ever-present. The archive is also a contested site, and here I introduce The Augmented Archive project as an art form that seeks to subvert both the archive and also the conception of time as a linear, chronological process. The Augmented Archive is a form of art that Rancière suggests work ‘at the crossroads of temporalities and worlds of experience’ (2011: n.p.). I argue that the Augmented Archive can help reveal how shaky and unstable the certainties with which events are declared to be finished.

In many ways, among the agents of this splitting of time between past and present is the archive. Azoulay et al. (2022: 518) suggests that the archive is ‘the technology that makes things belong to the past, since it is the incarnation of this separation between tenses’, and that our task, as critical scholars, is to unlearn this splitting between past and present. Certainly, postcolonial thought has for long been wary of attempts to depict the past and present as two distinct spaces, never to overlap nor meet. In her work on Dutch colonial archives, Stoler argues that what ‘constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification signal at specific times are the very substance of colonial politics’ (2002: 92). Rather, postcolonial scholarship is attuned to the ways in which the past and present intersect; a past living in the present and the present that was always there in the past (see also Jabri, 2013; Scott, 2014). The past is enacted through rituals and performances of memorialisation, but these tend to reproduce a linear time, the time of the state (Edkins, 2003). Power, therefore, renders the past and present as two separate spaces, the present is here, all around us, while the past is stored there, in monumental buildings, or for our purposes here in the building of the archive. In short, power severs the ‘event’ from the urban spaces in which it took place. We can add to Ranciere’s summary of power’s interpellation: ‘move along, there is nothing to see here’ (2010), to ‘move along, there was never anything to see here’. The task, then, is to reenforce other spaces with memory and to return the archive to these spaces. It is also to depart from the idea of revolution as a break, and to see the overlaps between past and present in the everyday.

We are helped in this by the increasing blurriness between past and present. The recent (and not so recent) pasts ‘impinge upon the present through modern media of reproduction like photography, film, recorded music, and the Internet […] The past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries’ (Huyssen, 2003:1). Memory and temporality have invaded spaces once presumed to be stable and fixed: cities, monuments, architecture, and sculpture. Cities and buildings have become palimpsests of space. While the metaphor of the palimpsest has long been used to describe cities’ physical form and the memories and experiences that shape urban life (Marshall et al., 2017), today, digital or virtual versions of the city mean this palimpsestic quality becomes much more visible, much more realised. Thus, an urban imaginary in its temporal reach may well ‘put different things in one place: memories of what was there before, imagined alternatives to what there is. The strong marks of present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses and heterotopias’ (Huyssen, 2003: 7).

It is in this space that I want to introduce the Augmented Archive project. Developed by artist and researcher Kaya Behkalam, the Augmented Archive emerged in the context of a practice-based PhD programme and while Behkalam was residing in Egypt. First presented in Cairo in 2017, the Archive was one of several initiatives aimed at providing an alternative archive of the Egyptian Uprising, such as Alisa Lebow’s Filming Revolution platform and the 858 Archive by activist group Mosireen ² . They are, furthermore, part of broader movements that view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production (Stoler, 2002). Together, these platforms are influenced heavily by pad.ma (an acronym of public access digital media archive) another online archive platform that collects video material initially out of the Indian cities of Mumbai and Bengaluru ³ . As such, the Augmented Archive does not present itself as The Archive, but one of many archives. In all these initiatives, the question of time has been prominent. For example, when discussing the 858 Archive, an anonymous member of the Mosireen collective writes that they did not want to ‘accede to the archive’s usual power to determine the factor of time’ (Mosireen Soursar et al., 2020: 38). Mosireen were keen to emphasise that the 858 Archive should not determine when the Egyptian Uprising began and when it ended. Likewise, the Augmented Archive is an attempt to experiment with the form of the archive, asking whether it can be a tool of resistance or if archives will always remain part of institutions of power (Behkalam and Ebeling, 2020).

The work of Walter Benjamin, in particular his Arcades Project (1999 [1982]), is cited as an important inspiration to Behkalam and the Augmented Archive. The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s idiosyncratic collection of vignettes and fragmentary writing (which he calls ‘convolutes’) on urban life in 19^th Century Paris, mirrors the way one might navigate the streets of a city. With an explicit reference to The Arcades Project, Behkalam sees the Augmented Archive as ‘a fragmentary poem guiding you through actual and potential disasters and desires, spaces and times of here and now’ (2020: 2). For Benjamin, the city offered the possibility to enact a kind of remembrance he called eingedenken, a more active form of remembrance than erinnerung (memory) ⁴ (Benjamin, 1999[1982]). Benjamin’s key aim in the Arcades Project was to break with the notion of history as the arbiter of events as they truly were, something he called the ‘strongest narcotic of the nineteenth century’ (Benjamin, 1999: 863). The Arcades Project’s form works on the premise of montage, ‘juxtaposing textual fragments from past and present in the expectation that they would strike sparks from and illuminate each other’ (Coetzee, 2001: n.p.). The project is in itself an archive, one that was not bound by and indeed broke with linear conceptions of time. Likewise, the city for Benjamin is never complete, it is ‘rune and ruin; aura and trace. It is never complete, but always already debris’ (Patke, 2000: 4). The trace, Benjamin tells us, ‘is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth’ (1999: 447). A city is an archive of memory and Benjamin’s approach to it is that of a collector and archaeologist, digging and gathering for traces of the past that remain.

Thus, echoing Benjamin, Behkalam describes the Augmented Archive as a ‘growing archive, a topography of the possible, a map of fragments from a city’s manifold presents’ (Behkalam and Ebeling, 2020: 2). The Archive is a GPS-based digital archival tool that is open to user interaction and engagement, available on IOS and Android devices. It displays videos at the site in which they were recorded through GPS and augmented reality technology and relies on videos from the aforementioned 858 Archive. Users must be close to the GPS coordinates for the videos to appear, meaning one needs to be in Cairo to operate it. The Augmented Archive first came to my attention when Behkalam presented it at a workshop I co-organised at the University of Warwick in May 2019 on archiving protest ⁵ . I was intrigued by the project, but it was only years later that I returned to it as I began exploring questions of time and temporality in my own work on aesthetics in the Egyptian uprising. I realised that I had been referring to the uprising in my writing as having ended, with the implication that it had failed, a position which sat uncomfortably with my experiences as an Egyptian living in Cairo at the time the uprising began (and “ended”). The Augmented Archive shifted my perspective to the complexities of time and how past and present are not so easily separated.

I first used the Augmented Archive on a visit to Cairo in 2022 and was struck by the sense of anxiety that I felt while using it. I was in the area around Tahrir Square, particularly Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which became a symbol of the uprising due to the proliferation of street art there between 2011 and 2014 (El-Shewy, 2020). 2022, however, is not 2012, and using the app invoked a sense of trepidation in me as I was aware that it may elicit unwanted attention from those around me. The Augmented Archive also taps into the ways in which urban spaces are mediated through digital technologies (Rose, 2022). Political geographers have illustrated how walking can be a way of understanding the connections between people, places, and environment. For Mason (2021: 2), walking ‘can examine embodied and intimate accounts of territory which research in political geography has not substantially explored’, and a way of exploring everyday political geographies of post-colonialism, militarism, and security. I had these words in mind as I navigated an area of Cairo (Tahrir and its surroundings, the area commonly called Downtown Cairo) that I knew well and experienced in during the 2011 Uprising. My experience was feeling wary of potential surveillance and so would often use the app and watch the videos that popped up for me surreptitiously, making sure my phone was not visible to other passersby. My fears may have been unfounded, but I did not experience the app as perhaps Behkalam intended. Rather than walking through Downtown Cairo relatively freely and using the app to guide me through the district, I instead found myself going to streets that were relatively quieter but where I also knew or anticipated content to be available, meaning the element of surprise was somewhat missing. The experience of using the app was initially discombobulating; I recognised many of the videos that appeared to me on the map having watched them when they first emerged online. Watching videos of protests, of people using public spaces in ways they were not intended to, can provoke an emotional response in the viewer, of shock, confusion, or solidarity. It invokes a similar feeling when watching them while present at the site where they took place, where in many cases most traces of the event (the Uprising) have been removed from those sites. What was also interesting was that the app did not always function as intended: occasionally it would crash while I was loading a video, or sometimes it would not start up at all. So, when Sakr (2023: 1) talks of the glitches that interrupt the system, ‘revealing the wiring beneath the technology and rendering it vulnerable’, we ought to be mindful of the ways technology can potentially disable forms of resistance, rather than enable them.

But there is also an important difference here that warrants consideration: When we watched videos of the uprising and clashes in 2011 or 2012, they were ‘real-time’, their affective power partly coming from their spread and immediacy. But it is no longer ‘real time’, and yet the video feed lives on, like a digital artefact or a fragment of memory. Sakr (2023: 18) calls these grainy, lo-fi videos an ‘archive of glitched history, leaked moments on the ground, mostly captured through mobile phones and uploaded somewhere public despite the mediated political environment’. Behkalam invites us to act as archaeologists, digging for the past. I see in the Augmented Archive project an attempt, therefore, to rethink what these traces and fragments of memory can do. This approach once again echoes Benjamin, who considered his method in The Arcades Project as literary montage, assembling fragments together so as to carry the principle of montage into history: ‘to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut component’ (Benjamin, 1999: 461). Benjamin’s work calls on us to pay attention to the political significance of fragments (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Screenshot from the augmented archive app. Source: augmented-archive.net.

Archives and fragmentary politics

Political geographers have long been concerned with fragments, broken pieces that remain, and their potentials. A fragment can be a material piece or a flash of memory that appears to us unexpectedly (Madbouly and Nassar, 2021; McFarlane, 2019). Here, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writing on urban fragments, I understand the Augmented Archive app as a useful way for us to rethink the politics of memory and archiving. Pandey describes the fragment as working against the violence that ‘wipes out evidence’ (1992: 35). Cities are among the primary sites whereby the politics and spatiality of the fragment is played out (McFarlane, 2019). For many residents, the city is increasingly experienced as a ‘geography of shards and fragments’ (Roy, 2015: 7). If, as Benjamin argued, capitalism had fragmented urban life, the fragments themselves could still be appropriated and put to use in other ways that allow for critique and disruption (McFarlane, 2018). While political and urban geographers’ interest in fragments has focused on fragments in terms of infrastructural breakdown and the collapse of public provisions (McFarlane, 2018, see also Graham and Marvin, 2001), I suggest, following Madbouly and Nassar’s (2021) approach to fragments as flashes of memory that can “attack” us in unexpected moments and places ⁶ . Benjamin’s image of the researcher is that of a rag-picker or collector and, as we use the Augmented Archive, so too do we become archaeologists digging through the past of streamed videos and moments of rebellion, hope, and loss, but also imagining potential (lost) futures. The images and videos the app shows us (the fragments) function as what Benjamin calls the dialectical image, a visual which ‘attempts to capture dialectical contradiction in an instant rather than as an unfolding of an argument over time’ (Rendell, 2021, n.p.). When we watched videos of the Egyptian uprising and clashes in 2011 or 2012, they were ‘real-time’, their affective power partly coming from their spread and immediacy. But it is no longer ‘real time’, and yet the video feed lives on, like a digital artefact. Behkalam invites us to act as archaeologists, digging for the past (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The augmented archive in use in Cairo. The video on screen depicts the same street 2 years prior, with a military road block. Source: https://kayabehkalam.net/the-augmented-archive/.

My argument here is that the Augmented Archive functions as a fragment in the form McFarlane calls a knowledge fragment. For McFarlane, a knowledge fragment is one of the ways fragments can help us think about space and politics. McFarlane again refers to Benjamin and the latter’s interest in montage which ‘interrogated urban space as both coherent and fragmented, singular and multiple, permanent and fleeting, predictable and nonlinear, and ordered and disruptive’ (McFarlane, 2019: 136). Knowledge fragments can be a form of generative expression ‘that presents clues to a different way of understanding history, or the nation, or community, or citizenship’ (McFarlane, 2019: 137). Furthermore, fragments can present clues to other histories that have been hidden, intentionally or otherwise, that ‘are hinted at in archival research’ but which give new meanings to categories such as resistance or politics (McFarlane, 2019). To extend McFarlane’s claim further, the Augmented Archive points to a felt or affective archive, one that can be read against more “traditional” forms of institutional archives. Rather than a singular institution that holds and dictates what the past is and how the ‘event’ unfolded, the Augmented Archive allows the user to ‘seize the hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (Benjamin, 1968: 255). The app is a tool of memorialisation, yes, but it is not memorialising for memory’s sake. Rather, it re-politicises those fragments of memory and breaks (or interrupts as Rancière would put it) the linear narrative of the archive and instead retains its own temporality. Furthermore, the Augmented Archive demonstrates that those interruptions are not merely ‘ephemeral outbursts after which everything returns to the normal order of things’ (Rancière, 2011: n.p.) but a method of inhabiting several times into one time.

For Behkalam, the Augmented Archive is an attempt to rethink what the fragments of digital feeds – the online detritus – can do, to archive those moments without them becoming ‘databases of defeat’ (Behkalam and Ebeling, 2020: 4), and to avoid them becoming material for the kind of melancholic reminiscence that Benjamin warned against. One way the app does this is to rethink the question of where its data is stored. If, as I have shown above, the archive creates a bridge between time and space, then the Augmented Archive detaches itself from concrete space. The Augmented Archive does not store its videos in a central space on the internet. Instead, it ‘scatters videos around the city they originally came from. It gives the images back to the sites to which they once belong’ (Behkalam and Ebeling, 2020: 8). The space that the app upholds is that of the city, of Cairo. The Cairo that one experiences while using the Augmented Archive, and the memory fragments it presents, appears unstable and ‘unfixed’ as Massey (1994) calls it. Through the fragments, users of the app experience a Cairo that was and a Cairo that could have been. It, therefore, enables a rethinking of the present as much as it does a reliving of the past. The Augmented Archive reconnects the spatial with the temporal. Furthermore, the Augmented Archive can help in demystifying attempts to freeze places in particular moments that are beneficial to power. Who else, again referring to Massey, is troubled by a compression of time-space if not the status quo?

Concluding remarks

This article’s starting point was to question the prevailing approaches to Egypt’s 2011 Uprising. These approaches have focused on the uprising’s failure, with failure here understood as an inability to reach some form of liberal democratic settlement, the assumed “endpoint” of any political movement. The aim of the article has not been to dispute this claim. Instead, I have shown how these claims are premised on a particular understanding of time and temporality wherein the past and present are severed into two separate spaces. At the core of this approach to time is a division between Chronos and Kairos. Chronos as the measurable passing of time while Kairos is the time of the ruptural event, where history can be made and the passage of time changed. The figure of Kairos is also important to how the past is narrated in world history. Here, Jacques Rancière’s suggestion that the reference to time becoming primarily one about an im/possibility of politics; in other words, a political act that was possible then is not possible now. This is an interesting angle with which we can begin to rethink our approach to ‘the event’. Rather than a time-bound and limited moment, insights from Political Geography allow us to see ‘the event’ as more open-ended processes that are unpredictable, immanent, and indeterminate, with their own forms of temporality and spatiality (Ingram, 2019). Thus, seeing Egypt’s uprising as having definitively ended means we miss out on a richer analysis of the alternative views of temporality that were offered up by the uprising. Furthermore, it limits the scope of the uprising to the confines of realising pre-imagined objectives. The causes of the “failure”, how the movement failed and how authoritarian emerged triumphant is taken for granted and, as Rancière tells us, the conditions (or the politics) that led to the uprising are now no longer possible.

I have illustrated how the archive – in its official understanding as an official body of storing the past – is the agent through which this demarcation of past/present, possible/impossible is made. With the uprising now over a decade old, it is easy to fall into the trap of looking back at that period with a sense of wistful nostalgia, of what might have been, rather than to see how the past impinges upon and lives on in the present. Here, I have turned attention towards alternative practices from Egyptian artists-activists that have sought to reinterpret the archive and to ask, ‘whether it is possible to create a place or institution of resistance out of an archive, or if archives will always remain institutions of those in power’ (Behkalam and Ebeling, 2020: 6). Here, Kaya Behkalam’s interactive visual art project The Augmented Archive, which overlays images and videos from uprising-era Cairo over the present-day map of the city, offers a valuable intervention. The project considers the archive not as a space separate from the event which it recounts, but takes it back to that space, in this case the city. Walking through Downtown Cairo and using the app highlights the ‘unfixed’ nature of the city. Indeed, the city was never fixed and the app highlights how the reference to a specific moment of a specific space is always done to the advantage of those in positions of power (Massey, 1994). The Augmented Archive recasts the city as a space of resistance, a space where the intentionally buried past can re-emerge, and potential imagined futures can be rediscovered. Put differently, the Augmented Archive belongs to that form of political art that Rancière refers to as working ‘at the crossroads of temporalities and worlds of experience’ (2011: n.p.), a potential interruption in the time(s) of domination.

Questions remain, which could form the basis for further research. Namely, and something that is perhaps intrinsic to all digital art forms, is that a certain level of expertise and media literacy is required to operate the Augmented Archive, skills that may not be widely available. This narrows the scope of who can possibly use the app. Who, furthermore, is absent from the media depicted? Related to this, and something that I hinted at in the article, is the primacy of Cairo to the app. How has the uprising continued to be remembered in other parts of Egypt? How would these memories differ to those present in Cairo, and how can we create a memory of resistance without privileging one space over others? These questions are not meant to take from the power the Augmented Archive presents, but rather to continue to think through them to continue to resist authoritarian space-times. Navigating Cairo through the app can lead to a disjuncture in the way we experience time. The Augmented Archive brings to the fore the way(s) in which the past continues to live in the present. In doing so, the article has argued, the app presents a critique of chronological, linear notions of time, and offers itself as an archive where multiple temporalities can exist.