"The memories of the people of Portsaid and their stories are extremely spatial." This is how Alia Mossallam an Egyptian Historian and the founder of the History Workshop Egypt Initiative described her experince while working in Portsaid, collecting testmonies for her research. Whenever any Portsaidi recites his/her story the details of the spatial settings flash into the eyes of his/her audiance. Is it because the city has been into multiple cycles of construction and demolotion, surviving the Tripartite Aggression in 1956,  the 1967 war, and the following years of silence, Alia wondered. ​

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While preparing for her second workshop in Portsaid, Alia and I thought of ways to represent the outcomes of the 8 consecutive days of researching the social history of the city in a spatial sense. We wanted to document the findings in realtion to the spaces of their happening. Alia showed me the pictures of the Fietas Museum she has recently visited in South Africa.

This  mural map was made as a sort of visual representation of the research work made by the participants of the eight days workshop held  in Portsaid from the 25th till the 30th of January 2016. The workshop participants were asked to gather all the visual materials they have found and to put them together in a timeline that only focused on five segments in the history of the city that were the main concern of the workshop. First; the construction of the city that was fundamental to the inauguration of the Suez Canal in from 1869. Second; the nine nights and ten days of the tripartite aggression in 1956 . Third was the days of war in 1967 and finally was the free zone era when Sadat announced Portsaid a duty free zone after the war. The visual materials used by the participants included scans and copies from primary resources of history. Newspapers, personal archives, court papers, photographs, songs and  many other ways in which counter history is written. 

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The making of the map took only two days in which we all agreed on a collective legend where each thread color represented a source /thyme of history (personal archives, flow of people and commodities,  etc) while pins represented different eras. On the last day of the workshop people from the city were invited to  add and interact with the map themselves. The map was made in the cultural center Boulvard and probably still standing.