kitchen table messy workshops, 2025-2026
The Kitchen Table Messy Workshops are periodic zine-making workshops hosted in my home, in Alexandria.
They’re open to adults and teenagers, artists or not, they run in small groups almost every week since November 2025.
Each session covers an introduction of what zines are- with their historical and political anchors, the collective crafting of a collective zines and personal smaller projects, a collective trip to the print shop downstairs and a binding session; giving to the participants all the tools to be able to replicate the process on their own, if they desire to.
The KTMW are just another experiment to try and resolve ongoing questions in my practice. My work has been dealing with the relationship between the body, the home, and the formal art space- so hosting workshops in a private, lived-in space is a way of observing what art-making looks like when it fully steps outside of the institution. Inviting people into a domestic setting to make things collectively is a way of turning the private into public, and of asking what blurring this boundary actually does. The workshops are designed as a deliberate break from the white box: an attempt to bring warmth, slowness, and a little chaos back into the art-making process.
Running the sessions on a pay-what-you-can basis, keeping groups small, and maintaining the setting as genuinely informal and non-hierarchical are keeping the sessions as open-inclusive-accessible-casual as possible.
They’re also a way for me to experiment informal education and to study how knowledge and discourse travel between people when the context is build as an intimate encounter. In the Egyptian context, opening a space for self-expression, teaching self-publishing skills, building community, and creating low-barrier access to artistic practice are small acts of activism, like planting some seeds and (hopefully) having them grow in the future!
