What if a brick wants to be a home?

I love bricks. I always have. Some of my earliest memories are of my Teta’s house; a monolithic double storey on the corner block wrapped in a poorly rendered balcony and grand staircase leading to the door. I loved tracing over the pock-marked walls with my fingers, feeling the coarse clay give way to glassy craters and shiny scars.

Teta’s home is double brick with no interior plaster. Everything is brick. It’s what I imagine being inside a woodfire oven might be like. So now when I see bricks, they evoke the feeling of that familiar garlic-scented incubator of love; its rough edges and warm heart.

It is this sensation of comfort and security I’m reminded of, as I continue to travel. The importance of home and what I mean when I say home. I feel comfortable in Australia but I don’t always feel at home there. It is a feeling that’s hard to articulate when I have known no other home and when being so far from it has me craving the comfort it provides. I’m not sure if what I am longing for is place or feeling; something to find or to build.

This search was part of my desire to travel with my mum to her birthplace: Egypt. A homecoming of sorts. A trip I hoped might shed light on a part of my identity and reveal something about myself. Returning home might somehow imbue me with an understanding. Something I can carry with me forever and wherever I decide to put down roots. I hoped too, it would shed light on my mum’s experience as someone who’s life and identity bridges more than one land.

Speeding along the elevated highway leading from the airport to Cairo City a maze of interconnecting lanes. Above in the hazy sky giants loom, watching the cars flow past like water. From the car the giants appear first in flashes of red brick and grey concrete you have to crouch down in your seat and look up to see how far they reach upward. The slab edges of each floor and the accompanying staircases zigzagging up the sides of these towers, reminiscent of fossilised skeletons exposed in red earth.

The ubiquity of brick struck me. It is used in most buildings from residential to commercial throughout the country. I saw this landscape with fresh eyes and tried to make sense of it. Sat in the back of an uber driving through the bleating of car horns and plumes of diesel fumes towards Cairo Downtown, similar towers hung over the traffic, though these were commercial buildings under construction, the lower floors rendered and ‘finished' while the upper floors, still incomplete revealed an inner core of brick. Further out, along one of the many channels that branch off the Nile brick farmhouses sprout up in the verdant fields.

During an afternoon stroll with my mum through Cairo Downtown, we stumbled upon Cairo Photo Week, a ten-day long photography festival with panel discussions, workshops, networking events and exhibitions. The talk “When a Brick wants to be something ELSE!” – on exploring the pure aesthetics of red bricks ignited my curiosity.

Architect and photographer, Nelly El Sharkawy presented her photographic series in Arabic. With my Arabic beginner level at best, I knew there was a chance I would miss the context of her talk. Despite this I attended and found the themes of El Sharkawy’s work clear.

Though the red brick is a commonplace single architectural unit, El Sharkawy argued it has an important symbolic power and represents Egyptian identity. She challenges the inherited social stigma brick that has been tagged with because of its use in the development of informal settlements, particularly on the fringes of Cairo. I later learned that many of the towers I had seen whilst driving into Cairo were such settlements, illegally built on agricultural land.

“Despite the ubiquity of red brick, it has come to reflect the stratification of Egyptian society.”

Despite the ubiquity of red brick, it has come to reflect the stratification of Egyptian society. This is represented in El Sharkawy’s words describing the association of bricks with, “poverty, chaos, ignorance, dirtiness, shame, and incompleteness.” Those who can afford to, cover their buildings in a veneer of painted concrete render in order obscure the raw construction elements beneath.

El Sharkawy’s images are an intentional provocation. Through skillful digital manipulation she takes to well-known Egyptian building and with the loaded symbol, transforms them asking What if the famous Ramses Hotel were entirely clad in Red Brick? No windows or additional details remain in her works leaving monolithic, structures; elegant, imposing and distinctly modern.

What is gained by such a simple adjustment is the renewal of an architectural language. One which takes a relegated and even hated building material and applies it to buildings which are revered as the symbols of wealth and status. At the end of the presentation someone asked:

how would these buildings function work with no windows or doors?

The buildings aren’t designed to function. The works are intentionally stripped back, enticing people once again notice what is already there. That bricks can be ugly. They can be beautiful and they can be something other than what they are. This compassionate and imaginative approach to spark conversations about how country’s collective identity could shift if it embraced its identity and re-interrogated its relationship to its material reality. An opportunity to turn towards the vernacular architecture, as a turning towards an honest identity, rather than towards an international style of identical towers hidden behind steel, glass, and render. I left the talk feeling ecstatic, popping candy going off in my brain. My mind rushed to Teta’s house again. How my love of brick was not what was felt in Egypt.

I often wondered why Teta’s house was so different to the neighbours. Houses constructed usually made from timber weatherboards. My grandparents migrated to Australia in the 1970s. My mum tells stories of this time with a mixture of fondness and bitterness when reflecting on the types of normalised racism and prejudice she faced growing up.

To think about the experience of my grandparents migrating to a new country with young children needing so much adjustment, it makes sense when they finally had the opportunity to build their own home, they used an architectural language they were familiar with.

A brick is strong. It is stable. It is versatile, cheap, and functional. For them, a brick represented a secure, sturdy anchor to ground them in an otherwise unfamiliar land.

What if a brick wants to be a home? And what if you want your home to be like a brick? That is how I felt, and still feel about Teta’s house. It is a point of continuity, a symbol of family and identity, as much as it is a physical place. A place I can visit and revisit, draw from like a well.

I’m still searching for what this means for me in my own life. I’m grateful for the reminder that the symbols of home may be in the everyday, in the objects and places taken for granted.

Thank you Nelly for permission to use examples of her work here. You can view the rest of the works from her solo exhibition here: Nelly El Sharkawy

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