The Egyptian Novel was written by Orly Castel-Bloom and published in 2015. In the book, Castel-Bloom tells a family story, one closely aligned with her own family's history, beginning with the marriage of Charlie and Vivian in Karkur in the 1950s and ending with the death of a close friend in Tel Aviv in the 2000s. Despite the attempt to chronicle the family's history, this effort repeatedly fails as the family tree is constantly disrupted by marginal and false details embedded in the biography. The novel is presented as fragments of events and places, pieced together, making it difficult to discern clear connections between the chapters. It narrates history as through the back door: the kibbutz is portrayed through the experience of being expelled from it, political revolution is filtered through personal experience, and the expulsion from Spain is narrated through staying in Spain and raising pigs.
The project features a series of visual simulations of places, representing spaces mentioned in the book. The use of simulations consistently highlights the impossibility of creating a true replica of real spaces using artificial tools. In fact, the attempt to approximate reality through light and texture only accentuates the gap between image and reality. These simulations aim to engage with this gap by depicting spaces from the story, but in a distorted way. Just as Castel-Bloom incorporates both truth and odd distortions into the story of her family’s past, the simulations embed spatial absurdities within the realism. At the heart of each simulation stands a single object (obscene object), depicted as cut off. This object symbolizes the marginal, the unusual—things often left unsaid—through which Castel-Bloom tells her family’s story.
The abundance of characters and events, which are disconnected chronologically, creates a narrative chaos. From this chaos, it seems that neither the characters nor the events hold particular importance. Instead, time and space themselves, as the connectors of these disparate events, become the true protagonists of the story. Castel-Bloom’s disruption of time and the variety of places allow her to weave metaphorical connections between events, producing losses, accumulations, and victories. A spatial or temporal "cut" of an object in a specific place and moment creates a rupture in the space, helping us follow Castel-Bloom’s perspective. The cut, as if it were a tool or a knife in Castel-Bloom’s own hands—and in the hands of her fictional counterpart, the eldest daughter—allows us to view the space after it has been narrated, after it has been cut, broken, and removed from context. This "cut" shifts from being a method of observation and analysis to an active architectural act within the simulated space, much like the role of the narrator herself