Time and fragmentary politics in Cairo: Rethinking the ‘event’ through Kaya Behkalam’s Augmented Archive

What is the aftermath of an uprising in a city? How do cities contain the remains of ‘the event’? This article addresses these questions through a focus on German visual artist Kaya Behkalam’s Augmented Archive project. Described as a ‘digital art and research project’, The Augmented Archive is a phone app that presents an archive of urban space in Cairo during the 2011 uprising and its aftermath. Utilising GPS technology, augmented reality, and video streaming, the app leads the user through the city’s past, present and future. As users navigate Cairo through the app, they are presented with videos recorded in the same place at a time now passed, evoking the heady, hopeful, but also violent days of revolution and counter-revolution. Users are also invited to upload their own video content to the app. The Augmented Archive is therefore a palimpsest; past, present and future overlay and speak to one another. By exploring the Augmented Archive , this article considers the implications the app has on our understanding of time and temporality in relation to urban space in the aftermath of large-scale political events. Navigating the city through the app can lead to a disjuncture in the way we experience time. The Augmented Archive brings to the fore the way(s) in which the past continues to live in the present. In doing so, I argue, the app presents a critique of chronological, linear notions of time, and offers itself as an archive where multiple temporalities can coexist.