“At the beginning of the 17th century, during an evening in Lucerne or London, the splendid story began. A secret and benevolent society (whose members included Dalgarno and later George Berkley) was founded in order to invent a country… After a two-century hiatus, the persecuted fraternity re-emerged in America. Around 1824, in Memphis (Tennessee), one of the members conversed with the ascetic millionaire Ezra Buckley. Buckley let him speak with some disdain – and laughed at the modesty of the project -. He told him that in America it is absurd to invent a country and proposed the invention of a planet.” – Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941.

Two years into the second World War, Borges’ novel The Garden of Forked Paths (1941) reflected his vision of the way in which the old colonial powers were re-drawing their objectives. From Buenos Aires, his words counter the narratives of Western press. Is the victory they speak of the erasure of the great civilisations in the Middle East behind newly drawn colonial borders? Was it the loss of his great friend and poet Federico García Lorca to fascist forces – from whom he had been gifted a great love for the Arab World – and the fall of the Spanish Republic to the Franco regime? Was it the new colonial interests of the United States that had already begun their deeper penetration into the South American continent and that would soon develop into planned military coups and the disappearance of thousands of his countrymen? For Borges, magical realism was not only a literary style, but a way of surviving in a world in which what is written does not appear to fit with reality.

This exhibition mirrors the seven chapters of Borges’ famous novel with seven artistic proposals that function as short-stories to a surrealist narrative of our times through imagination and abstraction. Borges’ role as an artist was that of an agent of subversion who used culture to reveal the indisputable machinations of a world in flux, an 80 year cycle with parallels to the cosmogenic shifts of today. This project positions Cairo as the timeless cosmopolitan city that the buildings of Darb al-Ahmar invoke as an escape from the silence and indifference that has taken hold of Europe in reaction to the fight against its strongholds and in an effort to fight against the colonisation of the imagination.

The artists in this exhibition present a new speculative reality that is constantly created through our words and faculties. It lies within the non-linearity of time and the idea that modernity is not true progress. It creates a multiplicity of stories that inhabit a reality which is the subsoil of all invented hegemonies. There is an everlasting resistance that survives in the mass and the multitude, in the forgotten silent words of centuries of civilisations that accompany us in the ancient streets, trades, livelihoods, and spirituality of Islamic Cairo. 

“In our memories, a fictitious past has already taken the place of another, of which we know nothing with certainty – not even that it is false. Numismatics, pharmacology and archaeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatar… A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our predictions are correct, within a hundred years someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.”