Amina Aly Dessouky

This project investigates the transformation of Saint Catherine—a mountainous, off-grid region in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula—through speculative urban development. Saint Catherine has been historically excluded from development agendas because of its topographical inaccessibility. It was always framed by the state as remote and barren. Now, it is becoming the focus of the Grand Transfiguration Project—a megaproject aimed at turning it into a “world-class” spiritual tourist destination. The research examines how a space long dismissed as peripheral and unproductive is being reimagined as globally valuable, and how the Bedouin semi-nomadic communities both shape and are shaped by this transformation. The project juxtaposes the way in which the remoteness of Sinai’s highlands is strategically utilized by both the state and the Bedouin community for divergent and often competing ends. Remoteness, in this context, functions as cultivated invisibility: a paradoxical condition that enables state expansion while also offering the Bedouin community room for maneuver, negotiation, and refusal. Using a landscape-driven ethnographic approach, the project traces how power is produced and fluctuates through everyday alliances and compromises—between ministries and militias, sacred ecologies, and speculative capital.