How does the Anthropocene play a role in your work?

In my own work, the Anthropocene plays a pretty significant role in the ways in which I approach and deal with my subjects of inquiry. Anthropocene-thinking provides me with a kaleidoscopic lens through which to see connections, dependencies and what Karen Barad has called intra-actions. I find this term of Barad’s very useful to work through an issue across categories and across scales, both spatial- and time scales. In my writings and in my curatorial work, I love bringing people and ideas of different avenues of thinking together, be it architects, agrarians, activists, bureaucrats, botanists, economists, engineers etc. This allows us to see issues such as ecological change in more complex ways. In my PhD, for example, I researched the capitalization of the desert in the desert country Egypt. Egypt has witnessed a massive construction boom over the past forty years. Dozens of new built-from-scratch towns have been built onto and out of desert sand in the country’s arid thresholds outside the fertile Nile Valley. One of the goals of my research was to better understand what drives this mass construction in desert regions in Egypt? To do that, I had to learn more about the complexities of urban construction in Egypt overall which also included learning about the physical conditions of the construction process, the labour involved, the financial system of building and real estate as well as its legal set ups. All those different elements enable mass-scale resource extraction, infrastructures of construction and the selling of land and real estate. My approach for this research was very much informed by ways of thinking with intra-actions. For example, I shadowed a construction engineer on site in the desert to learn more about moving vast amounts of sand. I also interned for a few months in an architectural design and research studio and I interviewed construction machine providers as well as hydrologists, botanists and environmental research groups about the conditions and impacts of this large-scale construction. This was followed by conversations with members of local bedouin groups as well as bankers, real estate agents and law makers to see a broader picture of the role of the construction industry within the local market and how it is quite literally embedded into the local desert environment. 

What project(s) are you working on during your fellowship at the Forum Basiliense?

While in Basel, I will work on two things. One, is the finalizing of a paper that I am drafting together with my colleague Dr. Dalia Wahdan (American University in Cairo). Dalia and I are looking here into a large land development deal on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast in Ras el Hekma. The working title of the paper is “The Investors’ Shoreline: Zone, Finance, and Extra-territorial Governance on Egypt’s Mediterranean Coast”. It discusses the geo-financial model of the Special Economic Zone looking at this zone-project in Egypt where the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi (ADQ) obtained rights for the development and operations of a brand new coastal metropolis on the Mediterranean. The second item that I will be working on in Basel is a book proposal for my first monograph. The book will be an in-depth investigation of colonial-capital relations and what I call the intertemporal resonances of desert extractivism in Egypt. The book will span discussions on land reclamation, hydro-politics and desert agriculture in Egypt as well as a deep-dive into Egypt’s mining industries and desert urbanism. The analysis will show how contemporary extractivist missions in Egypt’s desert lands concretely rely on the country’s British colonial past where bureaucrats, military personnel and scientists intervened in drylands with science, experimentation, extractive practices and policing.