Sabil-Kuttab Automate

Overview

Expanding on Paola Yacoub’s interest in the relation between architecture and automate, Sabil-Kuttab Automate (2017) considers architecture’s functional value and capacity as a purveyor of cultural preservation and production. In response to the symptomatic rise of commercial neoliberal urban planning and tourist development in Cairo, the artist focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings in Mamluk and Ottoman Cairo called the Sabil-Kuttab. The structures comprise a fountain, or sabil, which provides free drinking water to passers-by, and an elementary Qur’anic school, or kuttab. Together, these elements embrace an ethical dimension and an urban poetry that the artist describes as a ‘gift’.

For Yacoub, the name Sabil-Kuttab aggregates the ‘gift’ of water and the ‘gift’ of writing, and therefore, of education. Yacoub’s sculpture Sabil-Kuttab Automate expresses this architectural event with the formative gesture of throwing pencils into water. The automate questions shortsighted Orientalist engravings of the Sabil Kuttab. It also introduces the vector space of farming, hydraulics and physics, coinciding with learning to harness the Nile River’s inundations of the city. This miniature automate refers to the Arabic tradition of linking, among other things, hydraulics to watchmaking.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 13.