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watched – as did everyone – the events that
abruptly began to unfold on the 25
th
. In those
days it seemed the entire world swayed back
and forth with the protesters, each time taking
a deep breath before the day of rage, on Black
Wednesday, at the march of millions, on the
day of redemption, and after Mubarak’s depar-
ture. Through this experience, a definite new
narrative for these rising bubbles emerged, and
the original concept transformed, in the artist’s
words, “from the idea of
breathing in solitude
to an idea of the capacity of mankind, of the
collective – to
breathe together as one
.
”
For
this reason, her initial notion of ‘man as bubble’
representing loneliness, disconnection and dis-
engagement was inverted and entirely changed.
The working of this footage hence became a
story, one that abstractly mirrored the different
stages the revolution in Egypt took, one that
also uncannily paralleled the stages of life’s
journey ـ isolated people coming together,
finding a common voice, working together and,
when the moment it is all over comes, inevita-
bly beginning again.
The film opens with the idea of the isolated
communication that occurred between individ-
uals, that summoned people out of their homes
to protest: people descending as groups to the
squares of Egypt; the fierce battle of the day
of rage between protesters and police and secu-
rity forces; the aftermath of this battle, with 400
dead: one solitary bubble rising like a collective
soul of the martyrs after it is over, followed by
a liberating moment of calm, recuperation and
re-grouping; finally, when things must begin
again, a new road must be found and an un-
known future redefined.
As explained by the artist, her memory of these
18 days is so crowded that it is difficult to sepa-
rate one event from another, one phase from the
next, to separate the dramatic, the moving, the
bizarre and the unreal from the chaos. But the
element that united each of these moments, the
theme that remained unerringly constant, was
single voices, single breaths made stronger by
their single purpose, which gave a voice to the
voiceless, breath to the breathless, and all who
came together as one, faceless and universal.
The events in Egypt, more than any other single
moment in the Arab Spring, were a microcosm
of the capacity of man to find a collective voice,
proving that people can manage to become one. It
was the first time that any recent generation felt
a universal solidarity on this level, watching oth-
ers shed so fast the characteristic individualism
that has shaped our times. Those breaths initially