Desert Cities

"Konrad focuses a direct gaze on these cities and their buildings. This is neither architectural, nor documentary photography. Her way of seeing things is unadorned and draws our attention straight to the incidental nature of the history of the real setting. She shows the very poetry of the everyday image that cannot be captured but that rather lingers as an afterimage in fragmentary memories.” Brigitte Franzen on Desert Cities, 2008.

In 1992, Aglaia Konrad travelled from the Egyptian capital to Alexandria along the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road. En route, she encountered a seemingly endless stretch of housing projects, passing her by like a mirage. In this expanse of arid desert and drab buildings, she saw nothing to remind her of the country’s great history. 

Konrad returned in 2004 to investigate these strange, skeletal cities in the desert, of which there are 16 in total. In the original master plan dating back to the 1970s, the cities were slated as new and independent towns outside the region of Cairo, intended to house 250,000 to 500,000 inhabitants. Cairo’s rapid population growth in the 1980s shifted the focus, however, and the developments were now seen as satellite cities to accommodate the residential overspill. The real estate boom and unbridled project development in the 1990s and early 2000s had an even more profound impact. In less than 15 years, Cairo almost tripled in size and the government began to envision the area as a sort of new Nile Valley. An artificial urban world sprawled from the city’s former gates, exacting its inevitable toll on the environment.

In Desert Cities, Aglaia Konrad confronts themes like migration, exclusion, neoliberal politics, globalisation and transnationalism. The photo series also ties in with her more general reflections on the impact of architecture on our environment. Through the repetitive and the systematic, she exposes the anonymity of a certain type of architecture.