SAFENA.7, Safena’s Scrapbooks
SAFENA’S SCRAPBOOKS
Published by Gulp Photos Plus, 2024
Safena’s Scrapbooks is a project that allows for a collective and interactive questioning around photography and its practices. It allows artists and photography enthusiasts to think together in an improvised fashion and in a collaborative nature about “the image” and to write together from a personal experience and an interest in photography and arts practices.
The pages of Safena's Scrapbook’s first edition curate the journey of 20 artists who share questions, ideas, emotions and prompts around photography for three months from their scrapbooks. The Korasat was on its own a breathing artwork, where we shared joy, agony, despair and hope.
The sections of the book:
1. Attempts to define the “Image” / “photograph”
2. On Memory and Remembering, an attempt not to forget .. and to forget.
3. The Panopticon, Photography, mobility, space and the city
4. Attempts to begin, Personal, sometimes vulnerable prefaces for the scrapbook.
5. On Emotions, Photography Practices, and Embodiment
6. Contemporary critical questioning of our photography contemporaries.
7. Who has the say on the archive?
Safena 7 is a cairo-based collective and a space and a journey without specific destination, a platform that is interested in photography and engages with its different practices and meanings. A a journey that collaboratively and intimately, through different programs, workshops, visits, residencies, screenings, writing, and open conversations, engages critically with the art of the image. It also centers the process of the artwork and celebrates unfinished photo-based artworks. Along these lines, Safena 7 is interested in contributing to different modes of exhibiting and publishing. The journey is improvised, inspired by the traditional Egyptian art "Waw" of El Sheikh Ahmed Berin.