Double Fantasy — Learning, Living and Loving with Ibrahim Massouda: A Surrealist Egyptian Story? Dupla fantasia Aprendendo, vivendo e amando com Ibrahim Massouda: uma história egípcia surrealista?/

This essay reconstructs the effaced life and afterlife of the painter Ibrahim Massouda (1925–2000), a late affiliate of Egypt's Art and Liberty Group and the Contemporary Art Group, who was exiled from Cairo, passed through Italy, and settled in Curitiba, Brazil, where he lived and worked for four decades under the assumed name Alberto Massuda. The inquiry begins with a poor facsimile — a thumbnail among hundreds printed during the author's directorship at the Sharjah Art Foundation — and with a single painting, known to the author only as Untitled Number 7.

Written in a first-person, autotheoretical register, the essay moves between archival provenance research, oral testimony, and the speculative methods of "storying," drawing on Saidiya Hartman's wayward histories, Kevin Young's hyper-textual reading of encoded narration, and the late Jean Fisher's figure of the trickster as an agent capable of shapeshifting between temporal and spatial orders. Deleuze's fold supplies a model for a subject splintering into heteronyms, conscious and unconscious selves — a condition the author identifies in Massouda's doubled pictorial worlds and, reflexively, in his own diasporic biography.

The essay tracks the artist's reappearance across three curatorial contexts: In the Heart of Another Country (Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 2022), its expanded restaging in the United Arab Emirates as The Diasporic Imagination Rises, and the multi-year research project Drawing Time: Duets. It argues for a visual-cultural fluency grounded in affect rather than documentary illustration, refusing the redundant binarism of orient and occident, and situates state-administered cultural amnesia — here, the erasure attending religious affiliation — as the condition that renders such lives illegible. It closes with the grandson's telephone call, and with restitution as an act of suturing.