Between the towering trees of Merryland Park, in a quiet patch of ground usually overlooked by morning joggers and afternoon picnickers, a new kind of Cairo Design Week space has appeared—one built from Egypt’s waste, but carrying itself with the quiet authority of architecture. This is The Renewal Space.
Conceived by Mai-t, a young Egyptian studio working in circular design, and realized in collaboration with FR Partnership — Fayyad Edition, the installation at first seems deceptively simple: four walls, a compact footprint, earth left raw. But step inside, and it becomes a narrative about material, memory, and Cairo’s constant cycle of making and remaking. Almost two tonnes of recycled Egyptian plastic form the envelope. The walls do not pretend to be stone or wood; instead, they glow subtly, shifting in tone as sunlight passes through them. From the outside, imperfections read like fingerprints—not flaws, but evidence of a material that has already lived. Underfoot, the ground is intentionally “Cairo”: flattened dirt, scattered fragments, a tactile echo of a city that has always thrived between the organic and the improvised.
Inside, four walls create four different encounters. The first is an ode to circularity. Curving and folding, the five-centimeter-thick wall guides visitors through the space, revealing and concealing the 10,000 tiles of recycled plastic that compose it. It is less a barrier than a storyteller, a material meditation on movement, where the curves themselves seem to mirror the cycles of waste.
Next is a display of Mai-t’s inaugural work, The Hand of Fatima by Yasmin Noureldin, which reimagines the Khamsa as sculptural tables, mirrors, and coasters. Each piece is crafted from recycled plastic, but neither sustainability nor craftsmanship is a gimmick—they simply exist this way, functional and ceremonial at once.
Across from it stands the Hieroglyph Wall, a grid of engraved sheets featuring ancient Egyptian words redrawn in clean, contemporary lines by visual artist Karim Othman—Protect. Youth. Circle. Renewal. The words form a quiet manifesto, while the material itself—teal sheets made from the industrial waste of baby diaper production—carries its own narrative of new beginnings.
While the front of the wall acts as a statement of intention, the back traces the journey of Egyptian plastic: bottle caps become pellets, molten blocks become sheets, and sheets become functional objects. Visitors are invited to place fragments themselves, turning observation into collaboration and completing the loop of renewal.
The final wall is The Love Letter Wall, featuring Shosha Kamal’s homage to Ramses II and Nefertari. Circular wall lamps glow like sun discs, engraved with hieroglyphic inscriptions of devotion. It is intimate, emotional, and playful—a final reminder that material and memory can carry stories across millennia.
Across its four walls, the Renewal Space doesn’t preach. It doesn’t romanticize. It simply shows what happens when a material most people consider a nuisance is given a new context. The result is an unexpectedly moving space, where plastic—all of which was processed in Mai-t’s solar-powered workshop and then assembled by local artisans in Old Cairo and Giza—becomes the star.
And even beyond the installation’s shimmering walls, Mai-t’s commitment to circularity goes further: waste generated during Cairo Design Week—including gelato sticks from Dolato—will be sent back into Mai-t’s material stream through their partner PAFT. Because for them, circularity isn’t reserved for Cairo Design Week alone. It’s a practice to aim to make common.