Vox Populi is an ongoing project by Lara Baladi, which includes a series of media initiatives, artworks, publications, an open source timeline and portal into web based archives of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and other global social movements.

GET INVOLVED

Protesters in Tahrir Square. © Mosa'ab Elshamy 2011.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

George Santayana

“…On January 28 2011, I joined the people in Tahrir as a regular citizen. Just as the YouTube video ‘Tiananmen-Cairo Courage in Cairo’ went viral, a friend posted on Facebook a speech Jean Paul Sartre had delivered to an audience of striking French autoworkers 40 years earlier. As the political tension grew, more and more images and videos of a packed Tahrir Square were uploaded. They echoed footage from other uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a vast array of past social movements. It was as though Sartre was protesting with us in Tahrir.

In an attempt to keep track of the events unfolding on the ground, I set about documenting and archiving, videos, photographs, articles and further data related to the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, while also collecting material on major events taking place around the world at that time. In parallel I researched and amassed footage that resonated with Tahrir Square and everything that followed, from historical footage (of which the Sartre speech is an example) to philosophical discourses, to banned cartoons, to political satire... I called this ongoing archive Vox Populi…”

Popcorn vendor in Tahrir Square. © Lara Baladi 2011.