Public Project
The Anti-Archive Residency Exhibition presents Sarah EL Raghy's art
Titled “Reaching for an Unknown Quarry” is a mixed media sculpture accompanied by an audio narration. The artwork draws from a partial inheritance of documents, contracts, stories, writings, and memories left behind by the artist’s grandfather, a quarry leaseholder in mid-twentieth-century Alexandria.
These fragments serve as a springboard for constructing a layered encounter with the past. Rather than attempting to restore what has been lost, the artist listens to what remains, and reimagines it through fiction.
The work includes a sculpture of cement, pigment, paint, and glue hangs like suspended terrain. It is a speculative landscape, or a map of a quarry never fully seen. On either side, headphones play a sequence of voices. One is the artist’s, another her grandfather’s, and a third, imagined, speaks from the perspective of a worker.
This work does not aim to resolve history. It sits in its tension. Sarah inserts her voice between the archive and its silence, between familial distance and inherited longing. Through this triangulated narration, she confronts the instability of memory and the impossibility of fully knowing. What emerges is not a portrait, but a space of listening, where time is layered, and belonging is uncertain.
Curator: Marwa Ben Halim
Reaching for an unknown quarry
Mixed Media Sculpture and Audio Narration
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