A fictional heist plot, in which 4 characters are mapping the supply-chain route of paper from the port to the immigration office, by plotting cameras on a table. This video is interlaced with shots of a conceptual map that connects historical artifacts, such as a 1937 military report on Egyptian highways. The script for the heist is based on interviews with staff at the Police Printhouse, the company that prints passports and other governmental documents, blending together the archetypes of citizenship and filmic tropes, working with soap-opera genre-style. The flow of the narrative, is seen in relation to the flow of the product, which simultaneously embodies the transformation of the product from a physical object (paper) to a social object (the document). Rather than seeing the actual map, the performance of plotting is seen from the perspective of the map itself.
The image depicts a scene from the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) declaration on the usage of biometric recognition in passports, in which a gift is being given by the Egyptian representative. The two corresponding videos depict interviews with photographers that explain the logistics of their procedures. One is the official photographer for the ICAO, who documents such moments as the wall- vinyl image, and the other is a local photographer in the embassy district in Cairo, who takes passport photos. These two compare their relation between the camera and the body.
This video installation includes a 10cm high (20m squared) stage that faces a screen hanging from the ceiling. The screen depicts a person sitting on a chair in front of a white wall. The speech performance takes the form of a visa interview, with questions asked from a voice off-screen, the person on the chair is asked to identify themselves. She identifies herself with the attributes of a specific document: the record of a $50 million loan in 1980 from the world bank to Egypt, to develop it’s pulp and paper industry. This fictional scenario endows a historical document with the human behavioural privilege of applying for paperwork.
The sound from speakers encases an entire room, playing a radio show that was conducted between the artist and a video company who produced a commercial for a paper factory. In the recording, the different staff members talk about the procedures of filming the paper being made, and the connotative goals in their recording processes, revealing the commodity production through the perspective of cinematic labour.
