From 20 October to 10 November 2024, the Italian Cultural Institute in Cairo, in collaboration with the Embassy of Switzerland in the Arab Republic of Egypt, is hosting the solo exhibition “The Return in the Day” by Italo-Swiss artist Dominique Sighanda in its gallery.
The exhibition’s original concept, designed to recreate within the gallery the journeys undertaken by the artist between the Giza Plateau, the Saqqara necropolis, and her visits to the museums of Cairo and Turin, aligns perfectly with the theme of the 24th Week of the Italian Language in the World (“Italian and Books: The World Between the Lines”).
The display includes drawings, notebooks, panels, large-scale images, and objects that embody the artist’s creative process and expression through the carnet — an ancient technique now revived. Sighanda has aimed to modernise a direct engagement with Egyptian culture, both ancient and contemporary, by repeatedly visiting the original sites where the pharaohs’ tombs are found, bringing back sketches and notebooks that give visual substance to the immediacy and authenticity of the subjects she has recorded in her diaries. Her drawings, created freehand in rapid sessions, capture the mysterious complexity and fullness of ancient Egypt.
The title of the exhibition, “The Return in the Day,” references the translation of the ancient Egyptian funerary text The Book of the Dead, a collection of writings that, along with other surviving papyrus fragments like the Diary of Meier (Egyptian Museum of Cairo), are considered predecessors of the modern carnet de voyage.
