Aziz art November 2018

Tahrir Cinema went live on
July 14, 2011.The public
experienced
Tahrir Cinema as film shown on a
screen constructed of wood and
plastic in the main thoroughfare
of the square. Surrounding the
screen were rugs for people to sit
on and areas for a larger standing
crowd to view the footage. Lara
Baladi created a collection of
footage that included videos shot
by activists directly involved in the
revolution.She was very broad in
her collecting, even showing
"solidarity protests"
from London.Being able to view
and experience images and
video taken by citizens in Egypt
was an abrupt break with
Mubarak's regime, where
photography was prohibited in
many areas of Egypt.Baladi writes,
"people in the square took photos
because they felt the social
responsibility to do so...
The camera became a
nonviolent weapon aimed directly
at the state, denouncing it.
Continuing work
Baladi received a Fellowship from
the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology's (MIT) Open
Documentary Lab for 2014 and
2015 in order to research, archive
and create a transmedia activism
project called Vox Populi, Archiving
a Revolution in the Digital Age.Vox
Populi is a multimedia
documentary that consists of an
archive of articles, images and
videos that Baladi had been
gathering since January 25,
2011.Preserving the ephemera and
the images of the revolution in
Tahrir is important to Baladi.
She writes that "most of the
images of the 18 days vanishing
into a bottomless pit thanks to
Google's PageRank algorithm, will
the vision of a possible new world
people glimpsed in [Tahrir] Square
die along with its digital traces?"
This expression of the fleeting
nature of the digital world informs
her current work.