How did Egypt's creative minds respond to the revolution. We ask six artists, and talk to the founder of In Place of War, a project that champions work born out of conflict
James Thompson first had the idea for what would become In Place of War when he was working in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in 2000, during the civil war. Thompson comes from an academic and theatre background and was invited there by Unicef, which had received a request from Jaffna community workers for someone experienced in developing theatre programmes for young people.
"It was during really chronic violence in the north and we had to take a mad route to get there to avoid it all," explains Thompson. "I'd read a piece on Sri Lankan theatre before I went, which basically said that there was nothing going on in the north, because of the war. But when I arrived I found a surprisingly active, interesting theatre community, plus musicians, poets and other artists. I found it intriguing that a) these people would still go to rehearsals and make art while shells were exploding, and b) people presumed all creativity and art would stop in war zones."
The following year, after 9/11, Thompson noticed a huge increase in artists questioning how they should respond to terrorism or acts of war, which gave him the embryonic idea for the project. "I thought if there are artists in Sri Lanka being shelled who continue to make art, I bet there are artists in war zones all over the world who could help people answer the question – how might artists respond to terrible events? So that became the premise of the project – to seek out and then to document such work."
Thompson's idea developed into In Place of War, based at the University of Manchester, which researches and supports art and creativity in sites of armed conflict. "In 2004, we got our first batch of funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council and we started visiting war zones, meeting artists and documenting their work."
In the years since, they have travelled to meet artists in areas of conflict from Gaza to Northern Ireland, Bosnia to Banda Aceh in Indonesia. They work with both established and emerging artists; sometimes, there's little to separate the two. "In some places, there's very little infrastructure for art, so, for instance, in Sri Lanka, the most famous poet was also the physics teacher in the local school."
In Place of War chose to launch its new digital platform for war-zone creatives in Egypt, inspired by the role artists have played in the revolution and how they continue to respond to it. "During the Arab spring, and in Egypt in particular, there was this incredible meeting of great unrest with social media and art, and that's very interesting, because suddenly artists have huge new audiences and people are communicating and sharing work in different ways. Egypt is really inspiring for people all around the world, but is also scary because it could still go very wrong."
For more info on In Place of War, see inplaceofwar.net. There will be a special event on 29 May at the Martin Harris Centre, University of Manchester, at which some of the featured artists will speak; get tickets at inplaceofwarstories.eventbrite.com
HEBA HELMI
The artist and lecturer who has documented the reclamation of public walls as a canvas for political demands and debate.
Graffiti was the most immediate and visible artistic response to the revolution on the streets of Cairo; prior to the uprising, graffiti wasn't much in evidence in the city. "The wall was not for people; it wasn't a public space," explains Heba Helmi, painter, lecturer and political activist, who designed anti-Mubarak publications before the revolution. Even when Helmi asked her students to take pictures of the streets of Cairo for projects, "always, always someone would approach them and say, 'You cannot take this photo' and ask, 'Why you taking this photo? Who are you?'"
The simple reclaiming of these public surfaces was an act of defiance in itself against the government. "This public space wasn't public," continues Helmi, "and that's why graffiti appeared so quickly after the revolution, because people wanted to occupy that space."
Some of the early graffiti served to reflect and highlight the people's calls for freedom, the removal of Mubarak, but also more basic demands, for food, for bread. "I don't think the artists knew in the beginning that they were documenting the revolution, but they reacted to everything and for me they became the voice of the revolution."
Mohamed Mahmoud Street, off Tahrir Square, is where the densest concentrations of graffiti can be found. Some of the earliest revolutionary graffiti remains and it's possible to trace the story of the last two turbulent years, in broken fragments. Most fascinating are pieces where graffiti writers respond to each other, fleshing the bones out of the first artist's skeletal story or responding to their message.
Helmi decided to produce a book documenting the graffiti of the revolution, after the Egyptian government produced an official book of street art, which she felt was sanitised and didn't tell the true story. Two years on, much of the graffiti remains and there seem to be more artists than ever. The Friday we are here, there is a graffiti jam called The Garage Walls to launch another two books on the graffiti of the revolution, reinforcing its pivotal role.
RAMY ESSAM
The songwriter who captured the spirit of Tahrir Square.
Ramy Essam is such a warm, gentle soul in person, you wouldn't think he was the voice of a revolution. But Essam, more than anyone,he became the public face of the role artists have played in supporting and responding to the Egyptian uprising.
The first songs Essam wrote, as a young musician, were love songs. "In Egypt, our culture is all about love songs," he says. But before the revolution, his writing became more politicised, prompted by Shady, his elder brother. "Shady is my library and he gave me information about everything in my life when I was younger," he says. "As I got older, he began to talk to me about the regime in Egypt, how bad the situation was, and suggested I write about it."
Like most Egyptians, Essam had little idea that the demonstrations that started on 25 January 2011 would end up sending reverberations around the world, let alone that they would utterly change the direction of his life. Essam wasn't even in Cairo that day. He was in his hometown of Mansoura in the Nile Delta, but went to Tahrir Square as things developed.
On 31 January, when President Mubarak made a televised address saying he would remain in power, Essam turned the crowd's response – "Irhal!" ("leave") – into song. He worried he would be dismissed by the crowd for his ponytail, but he captured the moment perfectly. "It was the best moment of my life, the spirit changed 100% for the positive… I was born in this moment in the square."
Within a week, half a million people had watched him on YouTube. As Pete Seeger once asserted: "The right song, at the right time, can change history." When Time Out compiled a list of "100 songs that changed history" late in 2011, Irhal was at No 3, just behind Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas?. Just ahead of Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come and John Lennon's Imagine. When soldiers cleared Tahrir Square on 9 March, they arrested Essam and tortured him for four hours, stripping him, beating him and cutting his long hair with broken glass.
Essam has since recorded 45 tracks inspired by the revolution and subsequent events. But even though the language of protest has changed in Egypt, it's still not accepted to openly attack the Muslim Brotherhood. Gigs in Cairo have been cancelled because of threats of violence against Essam from their supporters. The week I'm in Egypt, he plays a gig outside Cairo one night and stops by our hotel in the early hours, exhausted but emboldened, to recount how a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood had pulled the plug on his show when he started singing one of his songs that rails against them.
"They are controlling the country now and I hate them, because they betrayed us. But we have already started the revolution against the Muslim Brotherhood," he says.
KHALED EL-HAGAR
The film director who returned from the UK in time to film the revolution.
The award-winning director Khaled el-Hagar is one of Egypt's most established and controversial directors. His first short film, You Are My Life (1985), won best film at the Oberhausen short film festival and he has since won 27 awards, including five for his 2001 drama Room to Rent. His most recent movie, El Shoq (Lust), won the Golden Pyramid award at Cairo's international film festival.
El-Hagar lived in Birmingham during the 1990s, but is now back in Cairo, where he witnessed the revolution. "The best aspects of the revolution, for me, were two things," he says. "First, that young people learned that they have a voice and they can talk. Second, it opened the doors for young people to make art, especially with digital media. They are communicating to the world now. If you've been living through a revolution for a while, you might not want to go and see a film about revolution; you might just want to watch a comedy. But in other countries they will definitely find an audience."
RAMI EL-FASS
The sculptor who runs an artists' collective.
el-Fass is one of the main artists behind 15/3 Studios, a young, innovative collective of creatives, including video artists, cartoonists, photographers, graphic designers, writers and producers. They produce their own, as well as group work.
Much of it supported and inspired the revolution, including video clips, political cartoons and caricatures that were displayed in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.
El-Fass is an acclaimed sculptor, whose recent work includes an exhibit made with parts from vehicles abandoned in Tahrir Square. "The revolution was very powerful," he says. "It changed my life and made me want to be a better man in my work."
15/3 is an inspiring studio; most of the artists were involved with and have friends who died or were injured in the revolution. "The people have come so far that I believe we will reach for a second revolution against the Muslim Brotherhood," he says.
The work of el-Fass's fellow artist Munchy Ellithy was even closer to the revolution. Months before it started, Ellithy, a video artist, was working in Dubai. On 10 October 2010, he uploaded an anti-Mubarak video he had made to YouTube. It quickly gathered thousands, then millions of views. Ellithy was warned not to return to Egypt.
Once the revolution started, Ellithy did return. In Tahrir Square, his video was shown on screens. "They were saying, 'Because of this Mubarak, because of what we see in this video, we will make the revolution against you.'" The revolution may be televised. Sometimes. Just not through the official channels.
AMAL RAMSIS
The documentary film-maker who chronicled the often absurd restrictions imposed on everyday life.
When Amal Ramsis started filming her award-winning documentary Mamnou ("Forbidden"), a year before the revolution, her starting point was the frustrating, almost rhetorical question under the rule of Mubarak: what isn't forbidden in Egypt? After living in Spain for a while, Ramsis returned to Egypt and saw the oppressive culture and regime with fresh eyes. "When I came back, I noticed the repression much more. But people had got used to it, and thought it normal. You would do something on the street and people would come up and say, 'No, this is forbidden.' It was, of course, forbidden to make this kind of film, so I didn't seek permission."
The film follows Ramsis on encounters with friends, showing how absurd life could be under Mubarak, with countless diktats, from who you could associate with, even to where you could walk. She watched a final edit of her film on the day demonstrations started in 2011, but then friends rang her to tell her what was happening in Tahrir Square. She decided to rework the conclusion: "When Mubarak left, it marked the end of the film, and I wanted the message to be: we changed the system."
ADEL WASSILY
The photographer who had to smuggle his images out of Tahrir Square.
Adel Wassily had worked as an engineer, but was drawn to photography in the late 80s, when he saw sections of Egyptian life that were going undocumented. His recurring subjects reflect a belief in the fair distribution of wealth, concentrating on the artistry in the minutiae of daily life, even when it is dominated by poverty. "My work is about the situation of the poor people. But, even when the situation is ugly, you can find beauty in it."
As a long time political activist, Wassily knew immediately that the protests that started in January 2011 were different. "Before, all of us protesters knew each other, but on that day, many people appeared who you had never seen before."
He spent days on end in Tahrir Square, and had to smuggle his pictures out, because it was surrounded by police who confiscated and broke cameras. "I had to give my sim card to other people to take out."
His book, Midan's Life, Tahrir 2011, consists of pictures taken during the revolution. One of the changes, as far as Wassily is concerned, is that the climate of fear has been punctured. "It has gone," he says. "We have broken the fear, and now that we have, no one can have that hold over us again."