Egypt was home to figures and families of diverse backgrounds and nationalities who had a great impact in shaping the social, industrial and cultural scenes before the 1952 coup d’etat. Most of them were affected negatively by nationalization and never got properly recognized or documented, specifically in the official narratives.
This project addresses the 3 waves of nationalization that took place between 1956 and 1963, and lasted until the collapse of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (Egypt's former president) socialist program in 1967. The project is based on quantitative and qualitative data of a 100 nationalized entities where each entity is visualized in a coded unit.
The aim: is to offer a form of visual documentation for nationalization, to question the nationalization decision and to suggest a different perspective to the official narrative by using data and diagrams to recognize and humanize the diverse communities that used to exist in Egypt.
Nationalization: is the process of transferring private properties and their interests to the government and the public sector. These properties then become under the complete ownership and control of the state where the former owner is deprived of all rights connected to the nationalized property.
The act of nationalization can be a product of different motives such as political, financial, economical or nationalistic. Nationalization resulted in drastic changes to the lives of indigenous and foreign businessmen and workers.
1. Nationalization in the Egyptian Context:
2. Data Catalogue:
3. Diagrams:
4. Downtown Map:
5. Misrphon Story:
Misrphon or Masna’ al-Sharq li al Ustawanat is “the first modern, automated Arab owned record factory in the Arab World” and in Africa. It was established by Muhammad Fawzy early to mid 1950s at a time when manufacturing records was an industry monopolized by major European companies.
Muhammad Fawzy is an Egyptian artist, singer, composer, actor, producer, businessman and a nationalist. Fawzy was born on the 28th of August 1918 into a wealthy family and pursued his studies at the Royal Arab Music Institute. He was a populist composer who knew how to keep up with what’s happening in the business and knew how to adapt to music mass media. He was praised for his in influential compositions on the creation of the modern Egyptian song, style and by applying the short song module as “vehicle.” Fawzy contributed to the Egyptian identity, popular culture and colloquialism with his commanding patriotic songs, children’s songs, Franco-Arab music, “up-tempo light musiqa shababiyya (youth music)” and his works in the musical film genre.
“Nationalizing such entities implies many hypocritical contradictory discourses and proves that the Egyptian state was not using nationalization as a mean to free the country from foreign superiority and control. However, it is the country’s way of establishing its power over it.”
"Arguably, Fawzy’s most valuable holdings were not “hardware” but rather “software” or “content” (to use this useful contemporary distinction between material and non-material resources)? not factory, but catalog and, more importantly still, contracts with important artists, most notably Umm Kulthum.”
*The project was initially created for a publication/ exhibition format and currently working on developing more mediums (website + Instagram account) to make the delivery more interactive and to allow more information and data to be accessible to a bigger audience*
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