Against a Politics of Forgetting

‘Demolishing, privatizing or re-structuring cities is how authorities control and shape the citizens in it. Change the structures, change the demography.’

Departing from the Arab Spring
The above quote above is taken from the exhibition Tracing Erased Memories by Hilda Moucharrafieh and Dina Mohamed. The project connects two forms of radical political action in rather different contexts with undeniably different dynamics at play: the 2011 Egyptian revolution of the Arab Spring and the squatting movement of Amsterdam.

The connection that Hilda and Dina draw between these two events is gentrification. Through gentrification, they argue, two different forms of political expression have been concealed, hidden and shoved under the carpet. In Cairo’s case, this is the collective desire for a democratic society as expressed by the revolution and in Amsterdam’s case, it is the very possibility civil disobedience as a form of political expression that articulates the problem of affordable housing.

Hilda and Dina come from Lebanon and Egypt respectively. Their home countries have been subjected to political unrest for a long time. Egypt has been struggling to democratise its political structure. The euphoric revolution of the Arab Spring that forced out the Mubarak regime in 2011 seemed to carry the promise of a desirable future for the country. Since then, it has taken a downward turn: the autocratic government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi that followed has been accused of numerous human rights violations. In Lebanon, the Arab Spring has turned into a terrible economic crisis and most recently the catastrophic explosion in Beirut, resulting in 200 casualties, symbolising the chaotic state the country is in as a result of the ineptitude of its ruling class.

Arriving in Amsterdam
Hilda and Dina had similar reactions when they arrived in Amsterdam. Looking down the almost clinically clean streets, polished building facades and glossy high-end stores, they, like many expats arriving to the city in the last couple of years, couldn’t help but wonder: where is the history of this city? Violence, they thought, could never happen here, violence happens elsewhere, far away from this polished urban landscape.
They soon discovered that this shining façade is a false front, carefully constructed to hide the political struggles that have shaped the city’s rich culture. An important recent dimension of these political struggles is of course the by now criminalized practice of squatting.

The similarities between these two different forms of political action are not isolated through the shared efforts from governments to conceal these unresolved traumas through gentrification. Of course, it must be acknowledged that a revolution and the practice of squatting are substantially different in terms of the form of action that is taken and the risk and violence that people endure. While the artists acknowledge the difference, they want to hint at the similarities rather than the differences. At the very least, the two distinct traumas are the result of the collective rejection of an unacceptable status quo. The artists use the term trauma to refer to the consequences of experiencing instances of e.g. extreme police brutality or evictions that have not be resolved properly. The “trauma” for individuals persists, whilst being denied by the cities visual landscape. In both cases (whilst to different extents), basic rights such as the right to demonstrate and freedom of expression were taken away from protestors, the social contract was broken, and activists were silenced.

Tracing Erased Memories
The exhibition Tracing Erased Memories takes you on a tour of the most gentrified spaces of Amsterdam like the Spuistraat, equipped with tablets that simultaneously show you how these streets looked before they were changed and ‘upgraded’, as well as showing similar looking streets of Cairo, contrasting the scenery before and after the revolution. With exact time precision the viewer is exposed to the shocking disparity of Amsterdam squat filled streets versus the polished architecture that marks the city now. Cairo’s Tahrir square full of protesters and mobilized crowds versus the Tahrir square that it is now, marked by a huge monument that prevents people from gathering. In both cases, many of the people that played a formative role in the city’s history are being pushed out of it and the original face of the city that could actually remind everyone of the role of ‘the people’ is concealed under layers of urban makeup.

However, Hilda and Dina’s exhibition does more than just shed light on these collective political traumas. Their project develops its political persuasive power by approaching the topic incredibly intimate, personal and direct: all the city guides have a rich connection to the city. One of them is Jeffrey Babcock, owner of an independent underground cinema who regularly tours through the city’s alternative cinema venues such as De Nieuwe Anita to bring people together and to keep the alternative scene alive. By involving people like Jeffrey, they manage to create a personal ambiance. They are looking for individuals of all kinds of political persuasions who would like to take care of the city’s past, present and future. It was precisely this aspect of the exhibition that made it so impressive: the conversation and discussion you would have with the two artists after taking part in the tour. Creating a space for meaningful dialogue and conversation seems to be a worthwhile task for contemporary art. In this case, it perhaps even provides a glimpse into a possible future of Amsterdam’s alternative spaces. It is important to conceptualize the concerns about the political development of our spaces in as many different ways as possible and to connect the local struggle for political agency to those elsewhere in the world.