Project by: Maii Hassaan - @maiihassaan
This thesis examines how misfitting materializes across Egypt’s urban fabric, investigating how it negotiates regimes of visibility and deviant social forms under socio-political pressures. Traversing misfitting in Egypt through theory, Zar ritual, street life, and the intimacies of the Egyptian home, the research haunts boundaries between theory, ritual, and lived experience. In doing so, it produces a synthesis of misfitting in contemporary Egypt as a liminal condition bridging theoretical and philosophical understandings of othering with its aesthetic and architectural manifestations as a lived emic phenomenon. The research unfolds within the Misfit Continuum, examining how Zar’s vernacular mythic spatial logic sets the “vibe” in space to host the passing of time and afflicted bodies in time. Through this reading, vibes act as spatial traces of friction between the individual and the dominant social and temporal order within a location. By mobilizing architectural drawing and techniques as sensorial recording devices, the research culminates in an experimental trace, The Misfitting Vibe-Infra, capturing how vibes inscribe themselves within Egypt’s urban fabric.
