AMR EZZAT (EG, 1980)
Residency period: May – July 2021
The text The Deer’s Visit explores the sentiments of moving between places negotiating the right or the desire to be in a specific place, to enjoy a walk or a swim, to inhabit or settle for a while, to stray, or in the end to be buried in a chosen spot.
The project begins as a fictional exploration of the life/death contrast, by imagining death as another mode of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, memory and desire, and as another relationship with society and nature, which will appear in the text as stories rather than an inactive memory in an isolated graveyard.
The Isolation of the Dead will be developed to reflect the feeling of being out of the social context and out of language, similar to the experience of being estranged and lost, and then pushing it to the point of feeling out of the human condition altogether.
The idea for the project was also developed during the residency, mixing fiction and nonfiction by integrating the narrative dimensions of the experience as a kind of feeling out of place, artistic practice being a challenge to the limits of place and time, to acts of love, friendship and social relationships as an establishment of common places over the time, and reconstructing the memories of revolting or political struggles and debates as disputes over the arrangements of these common places.
The actual mysterious visit of a lost deer to La Becque’s garden that summer has come to be the central theme and its wandering will draw connecting lines between the different storylines.
English translation of an excerpt of “The Deer’s Visit”
Amr Ezzat is an Egyptian writer. Born in 1980 in Cairo, he studied engineering and philosophy at Cairo University. Worked early on as an engineer, then as a journalist, columnist and researcher. Ezzat write regularly short stories, texts, critique and reviews in literature and art magazines and collective publications.