September 24, 2016
Rameses Hilton,
Cairo
Fridays mark the
start of the weekend in Cairo. Traffic over the 6th
October bridge was noticeably light. Light for Cairo, that is. The
stream of cars was steady, but the honking, which is synonymous with
Cairo drivers, had all but disappeared. Drivers honk when they want
another driver to know something – usually that they are about to
overtake them, or that they are changing lanes, of that they are
about to hit you. It’s a friendly way of exchanging information.
It’s noisier than the way we do it at home, but it works.
This Friday morning,
we hired a car and a guide to take us out past the City of the Dead
to see a recent piece of street art by the artist who goes by eL
Seed. It is a very large circular mural in white and bright
colours that spans a neighbourhood of red brick apartment buildings
in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Cairo. To get there, our
minivan had to navigate narrow streets filled with pedestrians, cars,
and in a few places, livestock. We saw pickup trucks carrying bags of
garbage up from the city to this neighbourhood where it is processed,
and where some recycling is done.
Mustafa, our guide,
told us about the problem Carienes have had getting their trash
picked up. In the beginning, you paid the city for electricity and
garbage collection on two different bills. This was mostly fine.
Then, the city decided to put both services on one bill – for
efficiency perhaps -- so you paid for electricity and garbage in one
lump sum. And that was mostly OK until the garbage collectors
stopped coming. What did people do? They refused to pay their bill.
Which meant the city turned off their power. In order to show their
disapproval, people dumped their garbage in front of government
buildings.
It’s outside of
the area where the garbage processors work where eL Seed created a
work called “Perception”. To see it, we drove up into the hills,
up to the Church of Saint Marcus and the nearby monastery. Mustafa
spoke to the owner of a local restaurant, who let us into their
second story dining room, the ideal vantage point to see the artwork.
Here is what what saw:
It’s a remarkable
achievement – all done unofficially. Lovely. You can listen to
eL Seed discuss the project in his TED Talk:
On the drive back to
the hotel, Mustafa asked if there was anything else we wanted to do.
“More street art?” he suggested. We said that we were up for
anything.
He took us a couple
of blocks from the south end of Tahrir Square, the site of the
largest protests during the revolution. It’s near the American
University in Cairo. There, you can still see some of the street art
that was created to speak out against President Mubarak, and then
later, President Morsi. Under the Muslim Brotherhood, making art
that was critical of the government was punishable by up to six years
in prison. The police kept watch and detained anyone they thought was
involved in such work. Street artists would have someone stand
lookout as they worked, and would raise the alarm if they saw the
police approaching. The police later changed tactics and instead
drove by in unmarked cars, trying to photograph the artists at work.
Political art was routinely, and in come cases, repeatedly painted
over by the police.
Despite the police
crackdown, but also because of the revolution that ousted the Muslim
Brotherhood, some of the artwork remains. Here is a sampling:
The demands,
illustrated: Social justice and bread. The skull-headed figure with
the eyeballs on the far right alludes to a disturbing practice of
collecting eyeballs from those caught protesting the government. The red eyes of the man eating a piece of pits says it all.
The puppet depicts
then-President Morsi as a puppet of sinister forces. I asked Mustafa about the significance of the cat-face stencil -- I saw it in a number of works -- but he did not know.
A harrowing
depiction of mothers grieving for the children, killed while
protesting.
Sheep brain. This
may be my favourite for its brevity and arresting visual style.
After seeing this,
what is there to think, other than: Jesus.
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