Amr El-Maghraby (born 1992) is from Alexandria, Egypt. He holds a BA and MA in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Alexandria University. He studied contemporary art at the independent art space MASS Alexandria 2015. In 2012, he co-founded the Bab Ashra art space in Alexandria. Two years ago, he moved to Dahab, a mountainous Bedouin town with a distinctive natural character in Egypt, currently undergoing social transformation between its Bedouin inhabitants and a remote-worker community. His practice spans multiple media. Interested in economics, his practice re-examine the mechanisms of exchange and monetary system. drawing inspiration from historically diverse contexts of how economic systems, have transformed into vehicles for social memory and collective imagination.

My recent preoccupations and interests revolve around the potential economic transformations that accompany the digital transformation, and how economic tools can become vehicles for collective memory and imagination, redefining the meaning andrepositories of value. I question how value is reshaped and linked to scarcity digital economic colonialism. My recent interest in these contexts stems from the challenges I face in my homeland of Egypt. This has transformed the research process into a personal research, exploring how collective consciousness redefines value.
I have turned to classical literature that address timeless human desires and aspirations, the myths and visions of alchemists concerning the transformations of matter and meaning, and narratives such as Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” which describes the plight of a group of young people in the 14th century who fled a plague-ridden city to a remote one to forge a positive experience. This period is historically marked as the beginning of the decline of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance. The novel describes the changes that followed the crisis, including the rise of mystical practices aimed at reaching God through reason and the emergence of a bourgeois social class of artisans who acquired wealth. Novels and works from this historical period hold significant interest in my practice.