A Conversation with an Unemployed, Installation view, Beirut in Cairo, 2013

A Conversation with an Unemployed, 2013

This image series successively magnifies the surface of a home duplicated cassette sermon purchased on Cairo's regular Friday market. The different microscopic scans render the topographic layers of magnetic particles of the tape into a visual cartography of the acoustic space it contains. That space not only includes the newly recorded speech but also remainders of every other recording that ever existed on the tape before that. What becomes visible are the palimpsests of multiple spaces and the layered stratification produced by the various recordings made throughout the life of the cassette. Since many or all of these recordings most likely took place in Cairo, the scans geologically excavate a signature of the city's own audio culture.