The Collage City: Reassembling Cairo’s Layers

“Cairo is a living collage — layered, textured, chaotic, and full of stories that overlap through time. From architecture and furniture to digital design and textiles, creatives across disciplines are constantly “cutting and pasting,” reassembling fragments of history, culture, and material into new forms of expression.

This conversation brings together designers, artists, and thinkers who work with layering, reuse, and reimagination — whether through collage, craft, urban space, or product design. Together, they explore how the act of assembling and reassembling can become a way to understand a city’s identity, emotion, and memory.

What can design reveal about a place built on contradictions and coexistence? And how does working with fragments — visual, material, or cultural — allow us to tell new stories about where we live?”