Making Media Public: On Revolutionary Street Screenings in Egypt

Nina Grønlykke Mollerup, Sherief Gaber

Abstract


This article focuses on two related street screening initiatives, Tahrir Cinema and Kazeboon, which took place in Egypt mainly between 2011 and 2013. Based on long-term ethnographic studies and activist work, we explore street screenings as place-making and describe how participants at street screenings knew with rather than from the screenings. With the point of departure that participants’ experiences of the images cannot be understood detached from their experiences of everything around the images, we argue that Egyptian revolutionary street screenings enabled particular paths to knowledge because they made media engage with and take place within everyday spaces that the revolution aims to liberate and transform, and because the screenings’ public and illegal manner at times embodied events portrayed in the images.


Keywords


Egypt, revolution, street screenings, information activism, media

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