When Worlds Evaporate (2022)

Solo exhibition

When Worlds Evaporate is an ongoing project of expeditions exploring the interrelations between preserved natural areas and urban environment. Working within and around the geographical site of Wadi Degla reserve in Cairo and its unique landscape, El Feky appropriates the language used in nature and geological museums, from sketches of living organisms in their environment and their ecosystem to bringing forth an alternative narrative of Wadi Degla. 

A landscape that has adopted and adapted to many changes, the stillness of the desert is considered with the movement of its past as a once vast sea. Wadi Degla was once a part of the Tethys Sea, yet by way of the apocalypse, it turned into a desert-scape that is slowly disappearing, swallowed by the urban sprawl of Cairo. The protectorate's boundaries have been redrawn several times in an attempt to reduce the invaded area but with no positive outcome.

When Worlds Evaporate explores these catastrophic changes and contraventions on the reserve, and its remnants is an attempt to understand the ecosystem before its eradication. With an accurate and interesting microscopic lens searching for hidden things under the rocks, discovering the engraved walls or unfamiliar plants in the midst of the blended vast desert scene one’s eyes are clean from the perceived chaos and a polluted urban landscape. Freeing a Sandy rock from a plastic bag to discover a world of marine fossils brings way to a hybridity of worlds (sea, desert, city; creating a strange combination of confusion while unearthing the layers of variation within it. El Feky Translates these excursions into an exhibition, as these worlds convey themselves through a sculpture and a drawing installation that layers the past, present, and future.