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This Day in History, 21 May: Egyptian poet Amal Donkol dies

Egypt Independent — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:44:00 +0000

Amal Donkol was born in 1940 in Qalaa, a village in the Upper Egyptian province of Qena. Marking a break with most poetry schools that predominated in the 1950s, which were affected by Western -- especially Greek -- mythology, Donkol found inspiration for his poems in symbols of Arab heritage.

Donkol experienced the 1952 Revolution’s dreams of Arab unity. But, like many of his fellow Egyptians, was shocked by Egypt's 1967 defeat to Israel, reflecting his grief in his masterpiece Al-Bokaa Bayn Yadai Zarqaa al-Yamama (lit.“Weeping before Zarqa’ al-Yamama”, in which the latter is pre-Islamic legendary figure).

His poem La Tasaluh (lit. “Do not make peace”) called against any peace with Israel, although Egypt and Israel then signed a peace treaty in 1979. His anti-Israeli poems caused him troubles with the authorities as they were sung by protesters with the same stance.

Donkol died of cancer on 21 May 1983 at the age of 43. He recounted his illness in his poem Awrak al-Ghorfa 8 (lit. “Papers of Room No. 8”).

Final Issue: ‘Crop’ challenges dominance of state-produced photos

Maha ElNabawi — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:57:00 +0000

This piece was written for Egypt Independent’s final weekly print edition, which was banned from going to press. We offer you our 50th and final edition here.

In early September 2010, a group of influential global leaders met at the White House in Washington, DC, to talk about peace in the Middle East. As part of diplomatic protocol, the arrangement of the leaders was carefully orchestrated into a symbolic “flying V” as they walked down the red carpet toward the media photo op that followed.

US President Barack Obama led the way, flanked by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordanian King Abdullah II, while former President Hosni Mubarak trailed in the back.

A couple of weeks later, the presidential “flying V” found its spotlight when the state-run newspaper, Al-Ahram published a blatant and seemingly unabashedly doctored photo of Mubarak leading Obama and their counterparts.

The original image, first published by Getty Images, was later altered by Al-Ahram to both bring Mubarak to the front of the group and to place his left foot forward instead of his right — the headline read “The road to Sharm el-Sheikh,” referring to the Egyptian Red Sea resort that hosted the second round of the Middle East negotiations.

The manipulated image quickly became a scandal within both the local and international journalistic communities — it was yet another clear-cut example of just how far state media was willing to go to defend the ruling regime.

But, unless you are one of Al-Ahram newspaper’s 16,000 or so employees, you’ve most likely never had the slightest glimpse of how political the image production process has been inside the institution.

Well, until now, that is.

For the first time in the institution’s 138-year-existence, two young filmmakers found themselves in the right place at the right time, with the right cinematic idea: “Crop.”

Co-directed by Egyptian filmmaker Marouan Omara and German video artist Johanna Domke, “Crop” is an experimental documentary shot entirely within the power center of the country’s images and news — Egypt’s oldest and arguably most influential government media mouthpiece: Al-Ahram.

In a nutshell, the 49-minute documentary film reflects upon the images in the 25 January Egyptian revolution, while placing it in relation to the “image politics” of Egypt’s leaders, from former presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat to Mubarak.

Since Nasser nationalized the paper in 1968, Al-Ahram has been widely known to be something of a mouthpiece for the state. As the film suggests, when Mubarak was ousted and presidential elections were taking place, it was believed that a major power vacuum took place within the institution for several weeks.

“It still took about four months of phone calls, paper pushing, chasing stamps and bribes of course,” says Omara. “We shot around the beginning of June 2012 — there was major reshuffling going on in the newspaper at the time, so there were gaps in authority, which allowed us to get the legal approval to shoot inside.”

From the top-level executive office toward the smallest worker, the camera seamlessly glides the viewer through several floors, from editors’ rooms to the sales floor, the printing press, the kitchen, and even the loading dock.

Amid the typical cacophony of Cairo noise, the film befittingly opens with a black screen and the ethereal voice of the film’s fictionalized narrator, who is a photojournalist at Al-Ahram newspaper.

According to the directors, the narration is based on a montage of testimonies from around 23 journalists, photojournalist and media theorists who have worked within Al-Ahram and Egypt’s state or independent media over the past few decades.

“By creating a fictional character out of the many interviews we carried out, we intended to pay tribute to all of them and not elevate one specific person,” explains Domke. “We created a story in which everybody will be able to recognize a part of himself. We found it very important that the narrator is not visually presented, as it would define the narrator as one person.”

Through this technique, the directors metaphorically challenge the role of images. By framing images within Al-Ahram’s building, the film examines the fallibility of images and the impossibility of objective truth within photojournalism.

At the same time, this rather simple documentary engages viewers to challenge how we perceive images and who is or is not included in the frame of Egyptian state media and, subsequently, society.

One of the main underlying themes is the concept of censorship, which is to be expected. But what the film chooses to emphasize is the debilitating self-censorship exhibited by many workers within Al-Ahram’s institution. The documentary subtly highlights the importance of an active, independent media and citizen journalism in combating state propaganda.

As the film continues, the narrator presents facts regarding each president’s use of images. The narrator attests that Nasser understood the importance of media, images and, most of all, how to naturally pose like a leader.

Sadat, on the other hand, attempted to play the same spotlighted role, but instead, he was often perceived as an actor on a stage that transparently hosted big media events to win adoration from the public.

His media stunts included images of him as a Pharaonic figure with a pole in his hand, a simple man from the countryside with traditional clothing, a family man with his beautiful wife and children and, of course, his famous bathroom pose — taken by his private photographer, Farouk Ibrahim. In this, the former president posed like a “regular man,” shaving in front of the sink wearing only his boxers.

The latter image actually caused a great deal of harm to Sadat’s public perception, since Egyptians were simply not used to seeing a president posing in his underwear.

Having learned from Sadat’s mistakes, Mubarak kept a distance from the media and the public. There were no extravagant events celebrating the great new leader, as in Sadat’s era.

Newspapers would only print pictures of Mubarak at official ceremonies — typically, he would only appear in controlled environments. And moreover, his image would be doctored in controlled environments.

The film also mentions that during Mubarak’s era, Al-Ahram published a picture of the president on its cover nearly every day of his 30-year reign. The only thing that changed over the course of time was that he was aging, which the photo department in Al-Ahram dealt with by retouching his face to “reward him his dignity.”

Towards the end of the documentary, the narrator mentions the discussions in Al-Ahram about the institution’s protocol of framing. For example, those living in the City of the Dead in Cairo were too poor to be represented, a veiled girl could not be shown in the newspaper, and farmers were too far away and too traditional.

The bottom line is that the majority of the Egyptian population was cropped out of the frame of images for close to 60 years, proving that the world we see through the media lens bears almost no honest representation of society at large.

But when the 25 January revolution broke out and thousands took to the street armed with their camera phones, Egyptians consciously or unconsciously challenged and utterly disrupted the state-manufactured images of society.

The people at large took media into their own hands. The film presents the idea that during those 18 days and since, the Egyptian people began fighting the images that had been imposed upon them.

They were shaping, and continue to actively shape, their own images, free from the gatekeepers controlling the images we see, how we see them and when we see them.

For Omara, this is the most crucial aspect of the 25 January revolution. In a way, expression has been liberated and there is no turning back, despite endless political setbacks. Thankfully, technology and the Internet are forces far bigger than any political institution.

Overall, the film provides an excellent account of modern Egyptian political history, in addition to a plethora of stunning and captivating images from Al-Ahram. But what the young directors truly succeed in is presenting the film as a convenient metaphorical vehicle to describe the enervating and bureaucratic nature of Egypt’s state institutions.

In one scene, we see several employees approaching a reception desk of sorts where they punch in their time cards as they enter and leave the building. While Al-Ahram’s office is surprisingly immaculate and advanced, there is something striking about how the institution continues to use analogue and paper-based systems at a time when technology reigns king.

While we may have removed Mubarak, the film challenges the idea that we actually removed his state, which continues to function through robotic, centralized and censored mechanics, seen in almost every branch of government.

As the film ends, it suggests that no matter how the past was portrayed and no matter what the future brings, a major silver lining presented itself in the wake of the 25 January revolution: a populous vision of the way in which humans and technology can act together to generate our own self-determined images — ones that mirror our reality, instead of the scripted, manufactured frame presented by state-controlled media.

We are no longer caught in the suspension of disbelief, but rather, with technology, we can create own collective memories and, hopefully, dictate our own identity.

The film fittingly closes with the last stage of Al-Ahram’s production — a delivery motorbike out on the streets playing singer Abdel Halim Hafez’s song “Soura.”

Hafez sings: “Image, image, image/Everybody deserves an image/Whoever leaves the frame will be left out of the image.”

Final Issue: Five great films, books and works of art

Steven Viney,Maha ElNabawi,Jenifer Evans,Ali Abdel Mohsen,Mai Elwakil — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:02:00 +0000

This piece was written for Egypt Independent’s final weekly print edition, which was banned from going to press. We offer you our 50th and final edition here.

From street art to a kitsch 1970s film, books that capture the zeitgeist to a striking bio-art exhibit, our writers share some of their cultural highlights.

‘Ghost Factory’ by Ghaith El-Lawzi

Written by Steven Viney

Ghaith El-Lawzi’s 2005 semi-autobiographical novel, “Ghost Factory,” was the first modern Egyptian book — also published in English — that really struck a nerve deep within me.

The novel reflects a zeitgeist of nihilism for some of those who came of age under former President Hosni Mubarak in the mid- to late 1990s. Hence, it was instantly easy to relate to.

Aged 20 when I first read the book, it became my personal version of Albert Camus’ “The Outsider,” personalized simply because it took place in Cairo and featured a soundtrack of popular songs of the time, as well as a cast of shady, hopeless characters that bore strong resemblances to many of the people I met growing up.

Though the book’s writing style now seems a little youthful for my taste, a few of its themes are still as pertinent as ever and offer a great archive, albeit semi-fictional, of what life under Mubarak was like.

The young characters in the novel are either born wealthy or end up in nowhere jobs, often strung out on drugs, and sometimes dying unnecessarily young — something I witnessed over and over as a youth in Cairo, either due to car crashes or some idiosyncratic occurrence.

The book also unveils a much darker side of Mubarak’s regime, featuring villa parties where ministers engage in extreme debauchery with young women, often forcibly. It shone light on the city’s huge hotel prostitution industry, the drug business fueled by the government, and all sorts of corruption and pitiful behavior within the lifestyles of the wealthier classes.

It was the first time I had seen the Cairo I knew written about so blatantly.

For anyone who now longs for the Mubarak days, I recommend reading this book to understand exactly what it was like to have been a 20-year- old under Mubarak in 1999, let alone in 2010, when things had reportedly become far worse.

The Alexandria street art gallery

Written by Maha ElNabawi

Shortly after Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011, I found myself in the seaside town of Alexandria on the hunt for cultural stories. Around that time, an interesting new street art project was taking shape along the once-barren walls of the Lycee al-Horreya Theater.

Organized by the Goethe-Institut Alexandria and local curator Fatma Hendewy, a team of local and foreign street artists worked day and night to transform the weathered walls into a kaleidoscope of color as they each painted massive murals spreading several meters wide.

The two-part project featured commissioned works by Alexandria-based artists, including Aya Tarek and Amr Ali, in addition to fantastic murals by some of Europe’s leading artists, including Mercedes De Gary (Spain), Ma’Claim (Germany), and MICKRY 3 and TIKA (Switzerland).

In this magnificent outdoor public gallery of sorts, with murals up to 4 meters wide, each piece is perfectly packed with symbolism, high-quality aesthetics and electrifyingly vibrant colors, which all culminate in a myriad of stunning expression.

For those lowbrow art lovers who find themselves dazed, confused, and awestruck by the ever-changing murals on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in downtown Cairo, it is highly recommended that you take a little trip to Alexandria to view this entirely fresh body of street art and colorful expression.

After visiting the outdoor gallery again a few weeks ago, I noticed that several new pieces have emerged in the time since the original murals were magically painted. The gallery continues to spread, organically, through the tattered graffiti of younger generations reminding us again that walls do talk when people have something to say.

‘The Black Dot’ by Waleed Taher

Written by Jenifer Evans

Waleed Taher’s square children’s book “The Black Dot” is about some children who wake up one day to find a huge black dot in their playing field. Upset, they try to guess what it could be, then try to get rid of it, then try to utilize it.

The whimsical drawings of stick people are washed out, smudgy colors that look like they could have been made by a child. They are basic, uneven, elaborate, out of control and funny.

This exuberant childishness is often evident in Taher’s work. In “The Black Dot,” no grownups appear in the story at all — the children are completely capable of sorting out the problem themselves.

Although it was published in 2010, it seems to have revolutionary connotations.

In the face of the mysterious dot, the group comes together, bounces around ideas to figure out what to do with the thing that is taking up their space, disagrees and gets nowhere, but ultimately triumphs through perseverance and creativity. It is hard not to see it as an allegorical dot.

There is a fair bit of text alongside the illustrations, but it’s poetic and fun to read. Also, it’s not too difficult to read if you’re not great at Arabic.

‘Al-Nadaha’ by Hussein Kamal

Written by Ali Abdel Mohsen

It may not be a great film, but as far as I’m concerned, viewing experiences are rarely as rewarding as when you’re watching “Al-Nadaha” (1975). Although its onscreen English titles read “For Whom the Wind Calls,” a more direct and accurate translation would simply be “The Siren.” True to its name, the film is a hypnotic and seductive work.

Dissatisfied with village life, young Fatheya yearns to “see the world,” by which she means “Egypt,” which is how the residents of her remote village refer to the distant megapolis that is Cairo.

It’s not an uncommon desire; villagers are often driven to insanity by the call of the siren and, when it grips Fatheya, the only solution is to quickly marry her off to her former neighbor Hamed, now a doorman in the big city.

Although based on a novella by acclaimed author Youssef Idris, the film’s storyline is almost secondary — you watch “Al-Nadaha” like you live a dream. Calmly melodramatic, repetitive in its theme music, kitschy in its depiction of “progress” and populated by stereotypes and the world’s sleaziest scientist, the film isn’t as concerned with realism as it is with depicting the world through the eyes of the bewildered Fatheya, who spends her first night in her husband’s Cairo room experimenting incredulously with the light switch.

Watch it once the way it was meant to be watched, then put the sound off, pick some good music, turn the colors all the way up and fall into it.

‘Ioconography’ on the Sixth Floor

Written by Mai Elwakil

All the art projects shown on “The Sixth Floor” should be picks. As with the Hal Badeel (Alternative Solution) arts festival held earlier this month, the artists, along with the curator, collaborated on every possible detail to bring the group show to life.

They cleaned and fixed the creaking walls of the old Viennoise Hotel, and took on shifts to welcome the many visitors. Throughout the week, you’d find visitors and artists hanging out and chatting. And, of course, the artists produced their projects. All 15 works were fully developed projects, rather than a random response to a curator’s invite. I choose to highlight one that swept me off my feet.

At the far end of the flat hosting the exhibit, a dimly lit room hosted the work of Heba El Aziz, “Ioconography.” Its aesthetic simplicity was heartening. Circular glass lenses hung on the wall. In each lay a photograph of an Egyptian icon, for better or for worse. From comedian Adel Imam and the late songstress Om Kalthoum to King Farouk and even Gamal Mubarak, but also the late Pope Shenouda III, Mubarak-era Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq and journalist Ibrahim Eissa.

Each photo gradually decolorized, taking on different hues of greens, blues, grays and an occasional spray of red. As I kept going back to take yet another look, Aziz’s icons continued to transform.

Aziz is one of the very few artists working with bio-art in Egypt. She is a bio-painter, who uses glass plates and photographs as her canvas, and bacteria she carefully cultures as her color palette.

Like all forms of life, that of the icons included, the bacteria changes over time. It is a live temporal art and watching it develop, I developed some attachment to it, fascinated, as it captured a cycle of life.

An artistic duo re-presents a dying art in Cairo starting tonight

Mai Elwakil — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:38:00 +0000

As they walked out from “I’m Nobody’s Shadow” onto the streets of the ancient city of Tunis, audiences couldn’t help but smile. The 20-minute long performance, shown in September as part of the Dream City biennale, was fun and stimulating for all those who attended. And that is essential to the Frinis’ practice.

Marion Frini relates it to her “inability to be serious.” And a quick look at Ghazi Frini’s vimeo channel and VJing performances highlights his humor and playfulness. But the artistic duo is dead serious; they direct all their creative energy into experimenting with their once seemingly disparate practices, and reaching out to a wide audience. To them, humor is key.

The Frinis performed “I’m Nobody Shadow” in a small room on the top floor of an abandoned theater. Marion’s shadow, along with live footage of her performing, appears on the screen playing around with the gigantic shadow of a birdcage and a chair. Occasionally, the chair would disappear from beneath her and so would the cage which she refuses to enter. With this, the duo was able to turn a much overworked theme, that of “Artists facing freedom,” into an exciting experience for the group sitting in the room with the real birdcage at its center.

Marion explained later how some audience members told her they were looking for a marionette of her inside the cage lying in front of them, trying to grasp how they saw the cage and chair whose shadows were cast, but not her own although they could hear her footsteps as she moved.

“Part of our idea was to make the audience lose perception; how could there be a shadow of a body with no body?” explains Ghazi. “But eventually people get the trick and play along,” adds Marion.

The Frinis are the first and, for now, the only artists in Tunisia mixing shadow theater, one of the oldest art forms, with one of the most recent, live Vjing. But, before they met in 2008 and began working together, their practices seemed quite unconnected.

Marion, a French artist from Lyon, has been dancing since her childhood, and gradually moved to the more improvisational side of performance with her interest in theater growing by the day. Ghazi, from Tunis, had experimented with sculpture and puppet making, marionettes and Shadow Theater, but dropped it all – at least temporarily – for the sake of video.

Being passionate about music and wanting to explore the potential of video away from commercial venues, he started VJing with a number of electronic musicians in 2007, including Zein Abdelkafi, aka Hayej. He also worked with dancers and actors; his videos being the backdrop for their performance, like with Feriel Folla in 2007 in support of the anti-globalization movement. He experimented with software and wanted to go into video mapping. But limited resources and bureaucracy stood in his way.

“But sometimes limited resources at hand can make you look in directions you would not have otherwise,” he explains. Ghazi began searching for a subject for his video projections, a person with whom he could literally incorporate the performative elements into his work.

Luckily, he met Marion, they immediately clicked – in fact they fell in love and got married – and started working together.

“We started filming together on the street with Marion as the subject. And after we went home, we would work on the footage to create a kind of filmed performance,” says Ghazi.

In their early works, their collaboration was in the form of visual play attuned to music pieces by other artists and friends. In “1983,” Marion’s physical expression was combined with Ghazi’s illusionary techniques, often manipulating the audience with the many layers.

The real breakthrough came, however, when they were invited in late 2010 by the Atelier D collective to create a performance in response to the Spanish classic “Don Quixote.” In it Marion’s shadow appears from behind a squared white screen and she begins to dance like a marionette hallucinating inside a box. But then Ghazi contrasts her shadow with a mesmerizing landscape that appears and disappears and continuously changes, affecting the space she has left in the box, both hers and her shadows which Ghazi also projects. To also mess around with the audiences’ perception, Ghazi wore dark glasses and pretended to be visually impaired as he sat among the audience and VJed live.

“Don Quixote was the real beginning,” says Marion. “We were both creating. We thought and constructed everything together.”

That was their first work with shadow play and allowed them to combine and experiment with their interests in music, performance, video and story telling. They would discuss the various ideas they had in response to a story or even experiment with visuals they found interesting to try and develop a story from that, constantly trying different combinations until they agreed on a final format, which was also often tweaked spontaneously during the live performance. If either one feels inclined to try out something new during the performance, they go ahead, and the other is able to play off it. And while they have been mostly using music by other artists as a soundtrack to their works, in their most recent performance “I’m Nobody’s Shadow,” they made the music themselves.

“We started with the visuals, while having a rhythm and structure in our heads, so when we came to make the music in the end, it easily came through in relation to the performance we had already created,” says Marion.

They have since been pushing their collaboration further, trying different ways, with their performance scheduled in Cairo this week, promising that Marion will no longer be behind the screen.

The Frinis will perform a version of "I'm nobody's shadow" on 24 and 25 April at 4pm and 6pm, and on 27 April on 2pm and 7pm at the Viennoise Hotel, 11 Mahmoud Basiony St., downtown, Cairo.

This piece was originally published in Egypt Independent's weekly print edition.