Ammar Abo Bakr came for the revolution, and stayed for the graffiti. On 25 January 2011, the fine art professor was sitting at home in Luxor when he saw YouTube videos of protests gathering in Tahrir Square. Two hours later, he was on the train to Cairo to join them. As those demonstrations wore on, he picked up a spray can.
“Back then, I just did simple things, like anyone would make – spraying messages on the wall,” he says. “I liked how the walls were like a newspaper; people wrote things like, ‘Don’t go down this street, there are baltageya [plainclothes thugs] down here’.”
That November, Abo Bakr joined a sea of protesters who flooded Mohamed Mahmoud Street, off Tahrir Square, trying to reach the interior ministry. The central security forces fought back with unprecedented new tactics: “non-lethal” crowd control, such as birdshot and teargas, that proved lethal after all. By early December, 40 protesters were dead, and many more had been blinded by birdshot.
Abo Bakr responded with a mural on the same street, portraying the blinded protesters. It was the first of his many large-scale graffiti murals, and the wall on which he painted it – owned by the American University in Cairo (AUC) – was becoming the most iconic graffiti wall in the city. The murals acted as an evolving visual commentary on Egypt’s revolution: the faces of Field Marshal Tantawi and Hosni Mubarak merging; a parade of martyrs as angels and corpses; pharaonic armies of women deposing mythical oppressors; a boy eating street food with tears in his eyes. Many places in Cairo are home to revolutionary graffiti art; many others have become synonymous with revolutionary conflict. What makes Mohamed Mahmoud street unique is that it has become both. Now half of the wall is gone. A few months ago, workmen began knocking a hole in the wall, sending social media into a flurry of commentary and reprobation. In November, AUC confirmed that they planned to demolish at least 40% of the wall in order to tear down the derelict building behind it.
In fact, downtown Cairo is getting a general makeover. Authorities are repainting building facades and have installed a triumphant new monument in Tahrir Square, watched over by multiple CCTV cameras. The city’s revolutionary graffiti art, however, doesn’t fit with the beautification plan.
In 2013, the former armed forces chief Abdel Fattah El-Sisi (now president) forced through an anti-demonstration law that has allowed for the arrests of peaceful protesters. Many graffiti artists have been arrested; the well known Ganzeer opted to leave the country after a defamation campaign. This year has already seen repeated assaults on freedom of expression, such as raids and closures of art spaces and publishers, and most recently the imprisonment of novelist Ahmed Naji. In such a climate, the “cleansing” of downtown and the demolition of graffiti walls dovetail ominously. The AUC wall, in particular, is a masterpiece of complexity, lyricism and ambition. Over a period of 50 days in early 2012, painter Alaa Awad organised the most famous mural of all: a riotous depiction of ancient Egyptian figures engaged in struggle. “My training is in mural painting, not really graffiti,” says Awad. “I decided to translate the sound of the people to the wall.”
“They literally started painting throughout the riots,” says writer Soraya Morayef of Abo Bakr and Awad, who has documented the work at her blog SuzeeintheCity.
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