I grew up with two concepts of home, one in Egypt and one in the United States, and this has directly influenced every part of who I am today, including my perception of the world, and most explicitly in my view of excess and wealth. My parents are the only ones of our family who came to the United States, and in this I recognize so much of my privilege, as I live in stability. However, my home in Egypt is in a poorer part of the city, my family is not wealthy at all, and my neighborhood is one that shares a street with a very large slum. In fact, the country has been, much like many parts of the world, a site of exploitation for its minerals. This has left the country in the dust while the west flourished, and one of these very important materials is gold. It is so important to my own culture, to the industry and history of my country, and yet, it seems as though everyone but my people see the fruits of it. 

 

This has been a tension I have lived with my whole life, attempting to understand myself in this context. 

 

What I have come to grapple with is that the reason for my own body being a site to me is because I view this as a reclamation. A reclamation of the beauty, of the opulence of gold. 

 

So, I set out to understand these places of informal architecture that suffer from this poverty that is a consequence of excess and exploitation; that I knew as a place of familiarity and a reminder of home. And then I set out to reclaim this opulence and reimagine moments of gold and beauty within these places to demonstrate not only that these places are not charity cases, rather that they are also sites of opulence.