Jasmina Metwaly & Philip Rizk: Out on the Street – Variations

Out on the Street – Variations is an exhibition of the project of the 2015 German Pavillion at La Biennale di Venezia.

The film Out on the Street (2015) is about an acting workshop in a working-class Cairo neighborhood. 10 men recount episodes of exploitation, humiliation, and injustice; their stories center on the privatization of a factory but invariably extend to harassment by police and Egypt’s corrupt justice system. The workers then reenact these scenarios, creating a biting exposé of worker conditions ever more effective for the immediacy of the one-room setting, which affirms itself—in the real time of the workshop—as a momentary haven from a life of precariousness.