MacGuffin Cairo Archives

210 x 275mm, 252 pages, stictehd binding

Amsterdam, Netherlands (English and Arabiclanguage)

One-off

Editors: Kirsten Algera, Oda Algera & Salma El Barbary

Design: Sandra Kassenaar

Following issue 13 of MacGuffin, the Letter issue, the MacGuffin team visited Cairo to collaborate with ten Egyptian and Syrian designers, artists, anthropologists and photographers. They went in search of the meaning and empowerment of Arabic letters in Egypt, looking beyond the official archives to fill in the gaps in the ‘official’ records: Cairo’s shops, graffiti, printworks, murals and the words written on trucks. 

This beautifully compiled publication is the output from that research, featuring plenty of visual research alongside detailed captions in English and Arabic script. It’s also a fascinating extension of the MacGuffin project, a smart addendum to the Letter issue of the main magazine.

‘In Cairo everything disappears. Archiving is a form of resistance,’ explained one of the participants.