The performance is an extended artistic form to a research-based art project that traces the domestic history of the middle-class Egyptian families. The performance was developed during a workshop by Artist Mohamed Abdelkarim and performed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Alexandria, Egypt. For me, “Domestic Fantasies (1)” is intended to be site-specific, temporal, and engages with the audience by staging the domesticity of everyday life, using the architecture of the museum as a spatial and temporal experience to question the everyday. The performance is action-based, yet I experimented by writing a text based and inspired by excerpts of Haytham Al Wardani’s book How to Disappear.

The performance happened in two acts. Each of them stage the everyday life of a middle-class woman that questions not only the gender roles, but rather a journey of self-discovery within the accumulating domestic experiences.

I used the gesture of running between the two acts, which created a space for the audience to become part of the experience if they chose to.

The performance starts when I, the performer, separate from the crowd and ends when I move counter-clockwise and rejoin the crowd.