Hide and Seek
2013 – 2014
in brief
The death of my grandmother was a very painful experience for
my family. It left us in a state of continuous denial, unable to speak
about her passing. It defined my personal relationship to the topic
of death for years: shutting it out of my life and averting my gaze
when encountering it. Later, I would discover that some families in
Cairo have a very different relationship with death.
In the project Hide and Seek, I follow two young boys who frequently
visit their grandmother at the family house, which stands within
a gated evangelic cemetery in Cairo. Currently managed by their
uncle, it is being run by their family for almost a century. This family
business has made death a natural part of their lives, shaping even
the attitudes of the very young in ways that were surprising to me.
When joining them on their visits, the boys would invite me to play
hide and seek among the tombs and concrete crosses in the arid
burial grounds. Chasing the echo of their laughter through the maze
of mausoleums, I shared their experience of this space as a cheerful
playground. The distant sounds of crying visitors, the decaying
flowers left by the graves, and the emptied coffins stacked to be
burned slowly failed to arrest my gaze, until they no longer halted
our games. Only once they would hold their breaths in hiding, the
creeping silence would rush in once again, reminding me of what
lies beneath the ground. This project is an invitation to retrace the
game of hide and seek in this unique playground, and — like me —
to stumble upon different faces of death along the way.