Description

Title: Roots of the Nile, Nubian village, Aswan, Egypt.
Photographer: Toby Andris
Print size: 30×30 cm
Paper: Epson
Year: 2023

 

Toby Andris is a Canadian-born filmmaker, musician, and photographer now based in Tbilisi. While film work takes up most of his time these days, he tries to keep up with music and photography whenever he gets the chance.

The word “Coptic” is derived from the ancient Greek word for Egyptian. Today, the word primarily refers to the branch of Christianity that became the dominant Egyptian religion around the 1st century AD, as well as the language and script that native Egyptians spoke and wrote at the time. In Egypt today, the Copts still represent about 10% of the population.

In this series of photographs, the civilizational layers overlap like inherited stigmata, the cracks in buildings telling us more about their collective history than any deliberate document could.

Egypt has been the seat of so many civilizations, and it’s built environment, tracing back centuries and millennia, bears their scars, like an endless palimpsest whose many authors eventually become indistinguishable from each other.