On the occasion of the temporary design studio MacGuffin organised with Archief Cairo, ten Egyptian and Syrian designers, artists, anthropologists and photographers went in search of the meaning and empowerment of Arabic letters in Egypt. Many of the letters they came upon were part of private archives, of collections that attempted to fill the gaps in ‘official’ records. Archives or collections are rarely complete, wherever in the world they may be. Sometimes completing them proves impossible. Othertimes they are deliberately left incomplete, as a managed form of memory loss. In the latter case, stories can become marginalized because they are inconvenient for institutions and holders of power. “In Cairo everything disappears. Archiving is a form of resistance,” said one of the seminar participants. “Artists, designers, houses, letters, and trees: they vanish abroad or are replaced by propaganda and shopping malls. We must recapture them.” In Cairo the group explored typographical archives to see what should be preserved and what is kept out of the public realm. In cooperation with Egyptian designers, MacGuffin presents a number of these Cairo archives in a supplement. The stories they contain, sometimes hidden or overlooked, can be read as a counter narrative.
