‘Urban Comix’: Collaboration, Reconstruction and Resistance in the Divided City
On Sunday 25th October 2015, commuters passing through downtown Cairo’s Ramses Martyrs and Shohadaa metro station discovered large, sequential images plastered to the walls of the platforms. Blown up so that they ran almost ceiling to floor, these graphic interventions in urban space began to receive a great deal of attention from Cairenes waiting for their next train. The comic tackled a pervasive form of urban violence experienced by many women living and travelling in Cairo. The UN records that a 99.3% of women in Egypt are victims of sexual harassment and, perhaps unsurprisingly, 91% of Egyptian women feel unsafe in the streets of the city.