Since the conflict began on April 15th 2023, over 1.2 million Sudanese people have sought refuge in Egypt, with the majority now residing in Cairo. Yet, despite the scale of this displacement – now considered one of the largest world’s humanitarian crises – their stories remain largely absent from mainstream media and academic discourse. To address this void, this project aims to amplify their voices, particularly those of displaced women, through the organisation of collective mapping workshops in Cairo. This methodology has not only offered a way to attempt to bypass the hostile research environment in Egypt but has also fostered a safe space to mitigate traumas experienced by forced displaced Sudanese. One of the key outcomes of this initiative was Akhir Faysal exhibition, which ran for a month and was largely attended. Throughout this period, a series of related events were organized, including the roundtable discussion ”A Transdisciplinary Dialogue on the Experiences (and Imaginaries) of Sudanese Women”, screenings of Goodbye Julia and La Combattante, and a live dance performance.
Additionally, three guided tours of the exhibition were led by Afraa Abdelhamid, Aatiqa Ishaq, Marwa Ahmed and Duaa Abuswar – three women who worked on the project – offering visitors the opportunity to engage directly with the research through the voices of those actively involved.
These events were conceived with multiple, interrelated objectives. Primarily, they aimed to transcend the academic boundaries by rendering research accessible and meaningful to a broader public. Simultaneously, they sought to foster a space for encounter and dialogue around critical yet frequently marginalized issues—such as war, forced displacement, and the everyday lived experiences of Sudanese communities in Egypt. This need remains both necessary and urgent in light of the ongoing violence in Sudan and the rapidly evolving sociopolitical dynamics in both Sudan and Egypt.
This text stems from the desire to share the journey that led to the Akhir Faysal exhibition. For this reason, we decided to open the article with a video of the exhibition – an invitation to pause for a moment, watch, listen to the story, and then follow us through the process that brought it to life. The text retraces this journey, beginning in January 2024, when the idea of setting up laboratories of collective mapping workshops first emerged.
The start of the project
Egypt and Sudan share long-standing historical ties (Ahmed, 2024), and over the past decades, many Sudanese people have either settled in or traveled to Egypt for various reasons. Prior to the outbreak of the current conflict, approximately four million Sudanese were already living in Egypt. These migrations have been driven by diverse factors, including conflicts in marginalised regions during the 2000s (Darfur and South Kordofan notably), political oppression during the Beshir regime, education opportunities, and healthcare needs (Brücker, 2020). However, the current context is unprecedented, as it marks the first time that war has directly affected Khartoum, compelling the upper and middle classes of the Nile Valley to flee their country in a state of panic, and as well as for the unparalleled scale of displacement, with over 12 million people forced to flee their homes. Women constitute a significant proportion of these arrivals, as it was possible for women, children under 16, and men over 50 to enter Egypt without visa during the first weeks of the war according to the Four Freedoms Agreement (2004) which guaranteed “freedom of movement and travel between the two countries [2]” Consequently, many Sudanese households in Egypt are now led by women, who often bear the burden of financial and household responsibilities by finding odd jobs.
While Sudanese have settled in various cities (mainly Cairo, Alexandria, and Aswan) depending on pre-war connections to Egypt and their social backgrounds, a significant number have moved to Faysal (Map 1.), a neighborhood situated on the west bank of the Nile opposite central Cairo, that, since the war, has become emblematic of Sudanese displacement in the collective imaginary. With a high concentration of migrants – including Yemeni, Syrian, and Sudanese communities – as well as Egyptians workers coming from other areas of Egypt, Faysal offered a compelling area to explore how spatial and social relations are continuously reshaped by newcomers, as well as a lens through which to examine the everyday and intimate interactions of displaced Sudanese.
Highlight in red of Faysal area.
Given this context, we began to critically reflect on how to engage with Sudanese newcomers in Faysal, taking into account the emotional burdens they carried, the difficulties of their journeys to Egypt, and the complexities of navigating daily life in Cairo. These reflections had to be carefully positioned within an increasingly securitized environment, where Sudanese communities are subject to heightened surveillance (Creta & Khalil, 2024). Moreover, given the sensitivities surrounding research in Egypt, it is even more crucial to develop creative approaches to narrating stories about the city (Ghiglia, 2022; Nassar, 2021). In this frame, Samrin, a geographer from the University of Khartoum displaced in Cairo, and Mariasole, a geographer from the University of Padua who had conducted research in Sudan before the war, began exploring how geographical tools could help navigate these uncertainties. This led to the will of using counter-mapping not only as a methodological tool but also as a practice that could actively engage participants in the research process. Counter-mapping could allow us to foreground the stories and voices of participants – that are usually marginalized from mainstream representations – at the center of research, de-centering the role of researchers and challenging extractive research dynamics.
To initiate this process, we circulated a call for participation via a Google Doc shared on Facebook and Whatsapp groups, inviting Sudanese recently displaced in Faysal (aged 20-40) to join a collective mapping workshop. Samrin’s network played a crucial role in lending trust to the initiative and encouraging participation.
About the process
The first laboratory took place in a Sudanese café in Faysal on March 2nd 2024. Its preparation involved several activities, including consultations with Collective Orangotango on how to structure the workshop, the translation into Arabic of a manual on collective mapping, and the printing of maps. Additionally, discussions with Marie Bassi, a political scientist and coordinator of the research center CEDEJ-Khartoum, which relocated to Cairo after the war, and Duaa Abuswar, a sociologist and research fellow at CEDEJ-Khartoum, resides near the Faysal area, highlighted a shared interest in the project and the potential for connecting different disciplinary perspectives and backgrounds.
Surprisingly, the workshop was attended exclusively by women. Eleven Sudanese women, between 20 and 40 years old, participated. All of them had experienced forced displacement and had previously lived in the state of Khartoum. Some participants were students when the war began, while others were already engaged in professional careers. Additionally, while a few had some exposure to geography through academic courses in Sudan, others were new to geographical tools. Taking these diverse backgrounds into account, we structured the workshop around two main activities. The first focused on individual mapping of the journey from Sudan to Egypt, asking women to trace significant moments along their displacement and situate them on maps.
Initially conceived as an introductory “icebreaker” exercise, this activity was designed to familiarize the group with mapping as a tool for storytelling while also deconstructing the common idea that maps are fixed representations reserved for cartographers. However, as the session unfolded, it became clear that the women were taking more time than anticipated to draw and write on their maps. As often happens in participatory research, the group took ownership of the process, leading to an extended emotional debriefing on their displacement experiences. For many of the women, this was the first time they could share their stories since arriving in Cairo a few months earlier.
After this initial phase, we moved to the second part of the laboratory, which formed the core of the project: conducting a counter-mapping of Faysal, the neighborhood where the women had been living since their arrival in Cairo. For this activity, we printed two large-scale base maps of Faysal and provided various materials – pens, color markers and stickers. The women began by mapping places of personal significance, starting from their homes and extending to grocery stores (dukkan), beauty salons, hospitals. Most of these places has been recently established by Sudanese, without any official registration, falling upon informality, and were therefore absent from official cartographic representations. This mapping process thus played a crucial role in making visible services and spaces that usually remain unrepresented in conventional maps of Faysal. Beyond identifying key locations, we also encouraged the group to reflect on their emotional relations to these spaces - where they felt safe or uncomfortable, places they liked or disliked, and areas with which they were familiar or unfamiliar, and why. By integrating these subjective layers, the maps became more than just geographic tools; they evolved into relational spatial representations of the everyday (Rossetto, 2019).
After several hours of work, we concluded the workshop with a final debrief, during which it became evident that more time was needed to explore further the discussions that had emerged. The women resonated with this idea. The intimate bounds woven throughout the session reinforced this perspective. Consequently, what was initially conceived as a one-day workshop gradually transformed into an ongoing collective research process.
Between March and September 2024, we met several times to further develop the collective maps and engage in discussions about the project’s trajectory and future directions. These encounters – whether mapping laboratories or shared iftar gatherings during Ramadan – mostly took place in one of the researcher’s apartments. This decision was informed by two key considerations: first, the need for a safe and familiar environment that would allow for the continuation of intimate conversations; and second, the practical requirement for a space large enough to accommodate extensive mapping materials. Yet, as these months unfolded, it also became clear how crucial it was to delve deeper into the personal stories of the women attending the laboratories. This realization led to the organization of individual interviews, designed to illuminate their life before displacement, their aspiration for the future and their expectations regarding the outcomes of the project.
During these meetings, it was collectively decided to expand the group to include the experiences of mothers, leading to the participation of three additional women, who enriched the stories represented in the maps. Subsequently, we agreed to organize an exhibition in the fall as an immediate outcome of the research process – both as a means of disseminating findings and as a strategy to circumvent the lengthy academic publication timeline. With this objective in mind, the visual anthropologist Farah Hallaba, the Sudanese artist Randa Yassin and the graphic designer Rayan Alhaj were invited to help expand our vision of what the project could become. In response to women’s expressed interest in creating materials that could be beneficial to other newcomers, Farah Hallaba facilitated a workshop on zine-making – a form of self-published, small-circulation booklet combining text and images. Given the security concerns surrounding the production of an “official” guide to Faysal, as well as the institutional risks associated with counter-mapping and the potential for co-optation by the authorities (Schweizer & Halder, 2024), the zine was considered a safer alternative.
SOUND OF THE CITY
Sounds from Faysal Main Street.
Sounds from Faysal Main Street.
Music from the street.
In addition to the zine, the significance of sound emerged as a recurrent theme in several interviews. When asked to describe Faysal in three words, women frequently mentioned zahma (crowded). In response, they recorded sounds from their daily lives in Faysal, recognizing that feeling/hearing the neighborhood was an integral part of their everyday life.
Randa Yassin, who also lived in Faysal, actively engaged in the meetings with the aim of using a different medium —painting— as a means of visualizing the themes that had surfaced in the mapping workshops. This process resulted in the creation of three paintings, which were allocated a dedicated space in the exhibition. All materials developed over these months —including maps, legends, and zines— were then handed over to Rayan Alhaj. In close collaboration with Farah Hallaba, who curated the exhibition, Rayan designed and visualized the research materials for the exhibition.
This is how the process unfolded over the course of a year —the above is merely a brief glimpse into the journey that led to the exhibition. We invite you to revisit the beginning of this text and rewatch the video, now with a deeper understanding of the work that took place behind the scenes.
As we write this article and during this year-long process, the socio-political context remains highly changing and uncertain. Some of the women involved have moved out of Faysal, new arrivals continue to settle in the neighborhood; and some have even returned to Sudan. Meanwhile, the treatment of Sudanese citizens in Egypt and the context of the war in Sudan continue to evolve unpredictably, rendering the near future uncertain. In such an unstable environment, where no one knows what the future holds, memory can emerge and fade rapidly. Thus, the exhibition served as an immediate means of documentation, capturing a specific moment in time when processes of remembering and archiving are particularly important in order to keep traces.
References:
- Ahmed, A. (2024), « From “Brothers to Sisters” to “Undesired Refugees” », ORIENT IV, p 34-44.
- Aldrin, P., Fournier, P., Geisser, V. et Mirman, Y. (dir.) (2022), « L’enquête en danger Vers un nouveau régime de surveillance dans les sciences sociales. » (p. 313 -330), Armand Colin.
- Brücker, P. (2020), « En quête de statut. Mobilités et mobilisations des demandeurs d’asile soudanais en Egypte et en Israël (1995-2015), thèse de doctorat en science politique », IEP Paris.
- Creta, S. and Khalil, N. (25/04/2024), « Inside Egypt’s secret scheme to detain and deport thousands of Sudanese refugees », The New Humanitarian.
- Ghiglia, M. (2022). « Chapitre 15. Comment la dimension de la surveillance participe à la fabrique d’une recherche. Expérience d’enquête dans l’Égypte post-janvier 2011. » Dans Aldrin, P., Fournier, P., Geisser, V. et Mirman, Y. (dir.), cité plus haut.
- Nassar, A. (2021). Geopoetics as Disruptive Aesthetics: Vignettes from Cairo., GeoHumanities, 7(2), p455–463.
- Rossetto, T. (2019). Object-Oriented Cartography Maps as Things. Routledge.
- Schweizer, P., & Halder, S. (2024). « Don’t believe the mapping hype! Three steps back for an engaged cartography. » In Rossetto, T., & Lo Presti, L. (Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities (1st ed.). Routledge.