(embodying the abstract,
abstracting the physical,
creating alternative(s)
and underlining truth)

from the big city

Swimming with the whales, is an art book publishing initiative emerging from Cairo, Egypt; the cruel mother of all vibrant cities, with an attempt to bring more freedom into collective and individual art practices. It curates experimental contexts through the approaches of: surrealism, slowness and nonsense; as mechanisms of self expression, self defense, and defiance. Through certain themes one will be given the space to create, describe, comment on, criticize, or explore: social, political, intellectual, and personal contexts. 

. . . to the ocean floor

This is our philosophical approach: we emerge from the belief that performing any form of art is an act of acknowledging the failure to communicate. Art could be the endeavor to capture the most subtle details of any experience to convey them; such as: the shape of a thought, its thickness, the way it moves; or the exact color of a feeling, its density, its place in the body.

And because everyone has their own map, and every moment has its own single life that can’t repeat itself, every artwork ends up having a life of its own separate from the life of its creator, and there is no such thing as a single interpretation.

Swimming with the whales is inviting artists and the receivers of this art to embrace these failures of communication and interpretation. We ask them to activate their subconscious and to communicate through its channels; to contemplate the silliness that this world brings to our everyday; to hide in the corners we create in our minds and emerge again between the lines. 

the massive whale

. . . won't swallow you

The purpose of this initiative is to create yet another platform of expression; to give weight to the subconscious as a hidden part of our reality; to highlight imagination as a method where people could find emotional and intellectual resolutions and shelters; to create SMALL revolutions through mapping and merely acknowledging what happens in our individual and collective lives; and to introduce the concept of active daydreaming.

It’s worth mentioning that this project could grow, or shrink, or change, or completely disappear.