by Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Shraddha Bhatawadekar, Argyrios Sakorafas, Hala Ghoname
In May 2024, MEDMACH team members Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Shraddha Bhatawadekar and Argyrios Sakorafas as well as research fellow Hala Ghoname travelled to Kenya to participate in the workshop “The Red Corridor and the Wider Mediterranean: Histories of Global Commercial Desires and Image Making”.
The workshop consisted of a two-day academic exchange at the Columbia Global Centers at Nairobi, followed by three days of travel around Nairobi and Mombasa. The gathering was an initiative of the project “Black Mediterranean/Mediterraneo Nero”, led by Professor Avinoam Shalem (Columbia University) and Professor Alina Payne (Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence) and was made possible through the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. Avinoam Shalem and Alina Payne invited MEDMACH PI Eva-Maria Troelenberg to join as co-organizer for this workshop, as the interests of both projects are closely intertwined and complement each other.
The container ship Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal in Egypt, viewed from the International Space Station, 27 March 2021. NASA JSC ISS image library. Source: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS064&roll=E&frame=48480
The workshop zoomed in on the geographical axis of the Suez Canal, which constitutes a central case study for MEDMACH. In this meeting, we considered the man-made canal as a contact zone between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in an interdisciplinary and transhistorical perspective. At the same time, the workshop’s scope reached beyond the Suez Canal itself, looking also at the wider seascape that leads through and around the Red Sea and redefines the region between the Eastern Mediterranean, East Africa and the Indian Ocean along the pathways of global commercial desire.
The program of the workshop mirrored how the two projects complement each other in terms of their time frame and historical focus: as Avinoam Shalem’s introduction lined out, “Mediterraneo Nero” focuses on the relation between the Mediterranean and Sub-Saharan Africa. It has its emphasis on the 14th-17th centuries, but always with an outlook on both pre-histories and later histories of perception. MEDMACH starts around 1800, but always looks back at the legacy of the longue durée history and historiography of the Mediterranean region and its global axes of connection.

Lithograph of Aden, from a volume of plates (32) entitled ‘The Route Of The Overland Mail To India, Atchley & Co.’, attributed to Henry Fitzcook. British School, ca. 1850-52. Source: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O514750/the-route-of-the-overland-print-henry-fitzcook/
The first day of the workshop revolved around the longue-durée of the Canal, based on elaborate case studies. Federico De Romanis traced the first human endeavors to create a shortcut between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, already back to the 7th century BC, demonstrating the plans and works of various rulers of the region, including Necho, Darius and the Ptolemaic dynasty. Mengitsu Worku focused on the transportation and usage of cedar in the Medieval church of Yimrehane Kristos in Ethiopia whereas Atef Mansour Ramadan discussed the diachronic circulation of coins in the Indian Ocean. Alebachew Belay Birru and Cheikh Sene focused on the mobility of objects in the Medieval period; Birru highlighted the significance of sacred objects such as beads and pieces of the Holy Cross in the Red Sea space while Sene demonstrated the connections between the Red Sea and West Africa in regards to various products, such as the cowrie shells. Shamil Jeppie’s lecture dealt with the Arabic manuscript collections in Africa and noted the absence of Arabic literature in the Sub-Saharan part of the continent. Finally, Richard McGregor elaborated on the aesthetic and religious implications behind Tomb Dressing in the Islamic world, focusing on examples coming from the Red Sea.
This first day emphasized the importance of considering seascapes in a longue-durée perspective, both from a historical and a modernist vantage point. Moreover, it demonstrated how intertwined the paradigms, queries and also dilemmas of historiography are when it comes to writing about movement around and human interventions into ‘liquid spaces’. For instance, Alex Wick’s monograph “The Red Sea. In Search of Lost Space”, published in 2016, takes its cue from what he perceives as a “scholarly marginalization” particularly of the Ottoman-era Red Sea, and wants to revisit this geo-cultural space with the instruments and paradigms of the Mediterranean studies, and yet through a postcolonial lens – an undertaking which certainly leaves much room for debate. When Wick comes to the Suez Canal, he notes that “(…) the perforation of the Suez Canal […] literally and symbolically, destroyed the Red Sea as an integral lived space and fundamentally transformed its internal and external flows. Not only did the digging of the canal, at an enormous cost of life (mainly Egyptian peasants conscripted by a regime of forced labor), lead to the direct exchange of fluids and biota with the Mediterranean, but it also affected the urban landscape of the region, with the creation and development of new cities such as Port Said, Ismailia, and Port Sudan, and led to the entrenched imagination of the Red Sea as simply a corridor, a passageway, a funnel, always leading somewhere else. It also gave a crucial advantage to steamboats, which could pass through it more easily than their wind-powered competitors, thereby ringing the death-knell of long-distance, interoceanic commercial sailing.” [1] This emphasizes the importance of an infrastructural change, but it also seems to repeat some of the teleological ideas about decline and modernity’s caesura, which often characterizes more traditional approaches in art and cultural history. At the same time, Wick goes on to acknowledge, with a reference to both Valeska Huber’s seminal work on the Suez Canal as a passageway, and to On Barak’s work on technology and temporality in modern Egypt [2], that the creation of this corridor formed a new, multi-directional constellation with a heavy impact on, but also the strong involvement of local agency. In his recent book on “Colonial Chaos in the Southern Red Sea”, Nicholas Stephenson Smith looks into the history of the Red Sea after 1830 through the policies of violence and disorder, characterized by the dissolution of old trade networks and empires and the rise of colonial agents such as the East India company – however, he tells this story from the point of view of what he calls “littoral populations” and their agents, not with new Imperial orders or nation states as a vantage point, but literally along the coastal line. The opening of the Suez Canal is presented as an important temporal and technological moment, but one which is neither the end nor the beginning of a new era. Rather it appears as a catalyst towards “rising geopolitical complexity” [3]. Against this background, the relation of the modern and contemporary periods to the larger longue durée not only of Mediterranean history, but of a larger history of connections and divisions is a promising field of qualitative research. As soon as we put constellations instead of linear narratives in the foreground, it becomes clear that historical continuities and interrelations are at least as important as the idea of periods, caesuras and historical eras coming to an end or turning point.

Illustration from Samuel Manning, Egypt Illustrated with Pen and Pencil, 1891, source: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.11715#0170
These notions were reinforced on the second day of the workshop through the presentations of the members of the MEDMACH team along with other ones. Eva-Maria Troelenberg traced a visual cultural history of the Suez Canal. Starting with Samuel Manning’s “Egypt Illustrated in Pen and Pencil”, she talked about a range of visual representations of the Suez Canal, exploring the epistemic dimensions of various pictorial modes and their role in shaping cultural geographies. Shraddha Bhatawadekar reiterated these ideas with a focus on the 19th century illustrations of a travel route from London to Bombay via Suez, which highlighted the power asymmetries within the colonial context of the time as well as the ingrained notions of modernity projected through the infrastructural developments of the 19th century.

Shraddha Bhatawadekar presenting at Columbia Global Centers Nairobi. Photo: EMT
Hala Ghoname zoomed back on the Suez Canal, talking about the aspects of representation and political appropriation of Suez Canal for the building of ‘modern Egypt’ at various points in history, as evident via various pictorial modes. The other presentations of the day by Claire Dillon and William Carruthers did echo the aspects of colonial encounters and post-colonial legacies through examples from regions around the Red Sea. Using the case study of Antonio Vandone’s arabo-normanna Cathedral of Mogadishu in Somalia, Claire Dillon discussed the cultural politics associated with the construction of the Cathedral in the late 1920s, unveiling the aspects of agency and representation as reflected in architecture. William Caruthers deconstructed UNESCO’s Nubian campaign of the 1960s, emphasizing the entanglement of the international agendas, nation-state politics and heritage, and also the resultant obscuring of people and their relationship to the past within the pretext of infrastructure development.
This post-1800 perspective is particularly connected to one of the main research lines which runs through several sub-projects within MEDMACH: Visual speed levels: images, acceleration and complex Mediterranean modernities. Under this headline, we investigate how image practices and visual perception are technically, formally and theoretically related to movement and acceleration. How does accelerated, machine-driven movement change the human gaze? How are the industrialized scale of movement and speed captured in images, but also how do images activate, propagate or also criticize and counter notions such as progress, expansion, and mobility? How is this related to the rise of certain techniques such as photography?
The modern and contemporary vantage point made clear that any discussion of a seascape must take into account the questions and approaches of economic and environmental humanities. This was illustrated by the screening of Bernardo Bertolucci’s short documentary “Il Canale” (1967). This film, showing the passage of an oil tanker through the Suez Canal, is part of a larger cultural policy which anchored the extraction of oil within the narratives of the Italian, Mediterranean and global modernities.
As the ensuing final discussion showed, the anthropogenic agency of the ‘machine age’ is not disconnected from the deeper historical layers. The “Red Corridor” is a central, paradigmatic site for the study of historical and geopolitical connectivities and disruptions.
[1] Alexis Wick: The Red Sea. In Search of Lost Landscape, Oakland 2016, 152.
[2] Wick 2016, 153. See also On Barak: On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt, Berkeley 2013; Valeska Huber: Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalization in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869-1914, Cambridge 2013.
[3] Nicholas W. Stephenson Smith: Colonial Chaos in the Southern Red Sea. A History of Violence from 1830 to the Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2021, 8,11.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Eva-Maria Troelenberg (May 28, 2024). Workshop “The Red Corridor and the Wider Mediterranean”, Nairobi/Mombasa 12-18 May 2024. Machinery Rooms of the Mediterranean (MEDMACH). Retrieved January 23, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12ml3
