Imitation of antiquity as a contemporary phenomenon: Lux Merx has documented Kairos' stucco workshops in several series of impressive photographs. The images in Cairo's Plaster Casts (Ruby Press) are complemented by essays from various authors, forming a broad cultural, theoretical, sociological and historical tableau.
Text: Sandra Hofmeister
Photo: Luc Merx
Magnificently decorated capitals, cranked cornices and egg-and-dart mouldings, stacked on top of each other and piled up side by side, are complemented by baroque balustrades and volutes of all kinds. Luc Merx's photos of Cairo's stucco workshops reveal an abundance of wild ornamentation. Luc Merx describes it as a 'spatial catalogue'. He discovered the plaster workshops during his walks around the city in the summer of 2019. Stucco craftsmanship in Egypt dates back to the 19th-century colonial era and later became independent. ‘I felt as if I were diving into the eighteenth-century Rome of Giovanni Battista Piranesi,’ says Merx. He captured places, people, and details with his camera. As well as the craft workshops in Al-Fusat, he observed stucco graffiti — street art incorporating stucco ornaments — and the plasterwork of the City of the Dead in Cairo. Many of the Cairo workshops where stucco ornaments and all kinds of wall decorations were produced for new middle-class Egyptian homes no longer exist today. During the city's rapid development in recent years, they were destroyed to make way for new neighbourhoods and the artisan families were forcibly resettled and uprooted. Consequently, many of the locations in the photo essays have been lost. Their documentation preserves their memory.
Photo: Luc Merx
A bag of surprises!
In his personal essay, Matthias Castorph explores the fascination of chaos captured in Luc Merx's photographs. The essays in the book are interspersed with five photo series and cover a variety of topics related to Cairo's plaster workshops. Holger Gladys and Dalia Wahdan supplement their overview of the development of Fustat, a district in Old Cairo, with insights into the social situation and fate of the stucco craftsmen's families. Other essays examine the typology of reception halls in Cairo's architecture, the concept of bricolage in the reception of antiquity within selected historical treatises, and, naturally, Piranesi and postmodernism in contemporary Arab architecture. Thematically, this book is a veritable grab bag. Although the structure of the content may seem somewhat disordered at first, it is based on the plaster casts themselves. These defy both order and abstraction. In the stucco workshops, quotations from history are ultimately transformed into a collection of decorative elements, always with the concept of ruin in mind.
Photo: Luc Merx
Ruins and quotations
The analogy with Giovanni Battista Piranesi's engravings from the late 18th century is addressed several times, antiquity, and especially Egyptian antiquity, as a preference in classicism. Gijs Wallis de Vries discusses the now lost Café degli Inglesi in Rome, which Piranesi designed in an Egyptian style using individual fragments. Reprise and recursion, indirect and direct quotations: semiotics has many terms for creative copying, evident in the use of stucco elements. However, the crucial question lies in the semantics that arise from signs and quotations. What does it mean when classical ornamental systems are deconstructed and turned into collages? The aesthetics of combination were common in historical collections of plaster casts, and antiquity collecting was an obsession pursued by Sir John Soane, for example. While neoclassicism was still charged with meaning, postmodernism treats the ancient reference as a self-referential quotation. In this context, Luc Merx himself takes up the reference to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
In the age of reproducibility
History becomes a catalogue of countless motifs. Antiquity is no longer unique; it can be reproduced many times over. This also applies to plaster casts, which can be purchased from standard catalogues for use in home decoration. Ninety years ago, Walter Benjamin published his influential essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. He viewed the subject matter critically in 1935 with the advent of photography, but it has long since reached a new dimension and also applies to rooms, arriving in the postcolonial age. Luc Merx's book provides insightful observations on this topic that are definitely worth reading.
„Cairo's Plaster Casts“, Luc Merx (ed.), with photographs by Luc Merx, Design: Something Fantastic, 306 pages, 168 x 240 mm, Hardcover, Ruby Press, Berlin 2025, ISBN: 978-3-944074-49-8 42
