The stories that the Nile tells: the god Hapi, the climate threat or the dominance over women

Already 2,500 years ago, Herodotus, considered the first of historians, wrote that “Egypt is a gift from the Nile”, knowing that every summer the river flooded the lands as a divine gift; When the water and silt retreated, it offered the farmers a natural fertilizer. From that prosperity emerged one of the first and great civilizations in history. Those capricious floods of the Nile persisted until the sixties, when, with the purpose of controlling floods and producing electricity, the controversial construction of the Aswan press began; a pharaonic work in modern times that would place Egypt in modernity, not without an environmental, cultural and social cost. Today the river is seriously threatened, drought and pollution have clouded the memory of one of the longest and also most legendary flows on the planet. The UN predicts that the country will face a critical water shortage in 2025.

'Hapy, in the tomb of Ramses III of the 20th dynasty' (2023). Cyanotype.MARÍA PRIMO

'A door is not just a door' (2023).MARÍA PRIMO

'Queen-Pharaoh Hatshepsut' (2023).MARÍA PRIMO

'God dies by the Nile' (2023).MARÍA PRIMO

'We are a river' (2023).MARÍA PRIMO

'A river is not a river' (2023).MARÍA PRIMO

Diptych composed of 'Tumba' (2023), on the left, and 'Adobe Old Gourna' (2023).MARÍA PRIMO

On the eastern bank of the Nile, in Luxor,

The Nile is more than a river emerged

,

a project that photographer María Primo began to give shape to over three weeks, during an artistic residency in the city built on the ruins of Thebes. . A multidisciplinary work that encompasses photography, video, drawing and ceramics and that can be seen at the Casa Arabe in Córdoba, curated by Blanca Torres. The river will serve the author as a common thread to weave a series of small stories that intertwine, where reality merges with myth and the past coexists with the present to allude to history, architecture, the climate crisis, to the exploitation of natural resources and to women. A journey that rescues the mythological exploits of the god Hapi, real stories of powerful queens, tomb robbers and visionary architects, where the complex relationship of man with his natural environment and his unrepentant anthropocentrism resonates.

The photograph of a landscape, which requires the viewer to literally turn their head in order to appreciate a dune surrounded by palm trees on the shores, serves as a metaphor for the deconstruction of the gaze that Primo demands, for his purpose of offering different readings that generate greater awareness of the significance of everything that the Nile dragged and drags to understand where we are today. This is the same panoramic view that opens and closes, also inverted, the publication that accompanies the exhibition, and places the viewer in front of nature before taking them through a stream of images that will transport them to Ancient Egypt, where the Trees were sacred and animals were gods. Animist belief that resonates in the ceramic pieces that Primo made in Luxor together with a local potter (a dying trade) to which are added those made in Spain with local clay adorned by hybrid figures.

Traditional knowledge and land use will also be reflected in a block dedicated to the importance of the vernacular and the value of recovering traditional knowledge. To do this, Primo will focus his sights on the utopian and truncated project carried out in 1946 by Hassan Fathy, father of sustainable architecture, in New Gourna, in order to house those who lived above the pharaonic tombs of Luxor, many of those who were dedicated to their looting. A project inspired by Nubian constructions, making use of local materials in total harmony with the environment that raises the delicate question of how to respect the tradition and logic of a territory while participating in the comforts and opportunities that it implies. Modern life.

'Queen-Pharaoh Hatshepsut' (2023).MARÍA PRIMO

In one of his treatises, the architect would use the image of the pharaoh Hatshepsut making adobe, whose covered bust, in the process of restoration, is also captured by Primo's camera. An enigmatic image that alludes to a powerful woman, one of the few queens who ruled Ancient Egypt, whom an attempt was made to remove from history. (references to her reign were erased from the temples until Champollion rescued her from history). Nearby, a triptych titled

God Dies by the Nile,

presents a woman in her traditional clothing on the edge of the fertile desert area. The title of the triptych pays homage to one of the works of the Egyptian feminist activist Nawal el Sadawi. “The female figure is becoming overexposed and consequently veiled in reference to the same invisibilization and dominance that has been imposed on both nature and women,” Primo highlights during a telephone conversation. “I have not intended to talk about the Arab woman, but about that separation between man and nature, about that binomial that we have been carrying since the industrial revolution. In the same way that man has used knowledge as a tool of power to dominate nature, he has wanted to impose his dominion over women.

Open to improvisation, to listening to the stories that the river was telling her, the author will incorporate appropriate images that serve to put the story in context, such as the image of the flooded Colossi of Memnon, something that is no longer possible to observe. Likewise, she will make use of the video, shaping a piece inspired by

The Hymn to Hapy.

A text written in the 12th dynasty dedicated to the god of the source and flood of the Nile, an androgynous figure who lived in the Bigeh cave near some waterfalls from where he emerged annually causing the flood. The author will also build a pinhole camera with some expired 35 mm rolls, which she will give a second life in a gift made in the Valley of the Artisans that talks about the impact of climate change on monuments. In short: a trip to the past from the present with the healthy purpose of feeding and sedimenting new stories in the face of the alarming ecological crisis we face.

The Nile is more than a river

. Arab House Córdoba. Cordova. Until July 20.

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