Just behind Tahrir Square - the central meeting point for the protests that brought down Egypt's ex-premier Hosni Mubarak last year - is some of Cairo's most beautiful yet tumbledown streets.
Old landmarks - like the Radio Cinema - and a mix of colonial-era and more recent buildings combine to create a true Downtown maze of alleyways, evocative rooftops and crumbling tenements.
Given that the area was so directly impacted by last year's carnage, the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) is taking this urban landscape as a venue to host a strikingly stellar cultural lineup and offer a 'creative vision of the future.'
With many of these incredible buildings out of use for years, the event has given downtown a much-needed polish up and shown the possibilities of taking advantage of buildings that had otherwise been consigned to dereliction.
Running from March 29-April 14, D-CAF includes exhibitions by the likes of Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour (whose work was really the centre of a controversy in a major art prize in Switzerland), as well as Nermine Hammam and the excellent Huda Lutfi.
The music lineup is also surprisingly daring, stretching from Egyptian noise-bands and electro-shaabi through to this odd ensemble from Indonesia, Filastine with Nova, described as 'meledromatic electronica'. Here's a sample:
A fine way to breathe some life and non-protest-orientated energy into one of Cairo's best neighbourhoods. Have a look at the full lineup here.
