The Kitkat Project: Episodes 1 ➨ 6

Serie of 6 performances/conferences

Episode 4

in french HERE

Kit Kat is an area in Cairo. This archived fictional artwork is trying to find the origin of this name. It is a mise en scène with many characters/ real people who created the identity of this place. The younger generation from Cairo tend to explain this name in relation to the chocolate brand. Older sources speaks about the dancer Kitty Foustaty and her night club Kitty Cat. The night club defined the area. The customers and the inhabitants appropriated this name.

Kitty Cat became Kit Kat in the area of Kit Kat.

However, this area has a long imaginary bygone. The night club disappeared and now, oddly there is the Khalid Ibn Walid Mosk in its place. The writer Ibrahim Aslan wrote “Malik ElHazin” in 1983. The story happens in Kit Kat and is mainly about a blind man: Cheick Housni, who is convinced that he is not blind. He is addicted to opium and he earns money by guiding blind people in the street and by taking them to cinemas to tell them the stories of the movies. ‘Malik El Hazin’ is an imaginary ode where the laugh, the love, the drugs and the music are presented as the only solution in this area. In the nineties, the filmmaker Daoud Abd El Sayed adapted this novel to a film: Kit Kat.

Thereby, this story is made from real events and persons. The so called “real events” are adapted to a book and to a movie. This project is working on how these stories integrate the collective unconscious and nourish the present.

The collected informations are not classified. The Kit Kat project is not a historiographical or a social research. The informations are collected from popular culture (other books of the writers and his son, Hicham Aslan, other movies as Kitty Foustaty ones,...) but also from real interviews with the current inhabitants of the Kit Kat. The memories of the inhabitants are blending with historical facts.