CAIRO — The intricate mural took shape over the past
few weeks, little noticed at first, spreading across a harried
quarter of Cairo where Egypt's garbage collectors live, amid
overflowing bundles of this overcrowded city’s trash.
By the time the painting was finished two weeks ago, it
stretched across more than 50 buildings, making it the largest
public work of art here anyone can recall. The mural, a circle of
orange, white and blue in Arabic calligraphy, quotes a
third-century Coptic Christian bishop who said, “If one wants to
see the light of the sun, he must wipe his eyes.”
When the first photographs of the mural circulated,
reactions ranged from astonished delight to disbelief. Some people,
struck by its seemingly impossible scale, seemed convinced that the
images had been digitally altered, according to the man behind the
project, a Tunisian-French artist known as eL Seed.
But what seemed most surprising was that eL Seed and
several friends who worked with him had been able to complete the
project at all, without being harassed or arrested.
Egypt’s highhanded government has shown little
tolerance for artists, sending agents to raid cultural centers and
recently prosecuting a novelist on charges that he had harmed
public morality. Street artists who made the city their canvas in
the heady days after the Egypt's uprising in 2011 have lately been
forced to work hastily or in secret, carrying out projects “as you
would a heist,” said Soraya Morayef, who has documented street art
over the past five years on her blog.
But eL Seed chose a forsaken corner of the city, called
Manshiyat Naser, away from the gaze of officials, the kind of place
where artists have had more space to work, Ms. Morayef said.
The artist said he intended to change popular
perceptions of the district, too narrowly associated with squalor,
and to celebrate decades of unsung work by its residents who sort
and recycle tons of the city’s waste. He has painted large works of
distinctive calligraphy in other countries over the past few years,
including in Brazil, France and Tunisia, but he said the experience
in Egypt, and the reaction, were “overwhelming.”
He chalked up the success of the project, which was
entirely self-funded, to his decision to work quietly, with the
cooperation of residents, but also to a visitor’s naïveté.
That meant ignoring the arguments that seem to attend
many public expressions in a testy Egypt these days. “Sometimes
when you come from outside, you don’t see all the problems that
might happen,” he said in an interview. “I was trying not to look
at the political situation, the economic struggles, and just focus
on the art project.”
The praise came from the neighborhood, young
anti-government activists and other artists. A well-known Egyptian
graffiti artist, Ammar Abo Bakr, writing on facebook called the
mural “the first of its kind” in Egypt.
“Just imagine that our artists who sell their art for
thousands of pounds decide to contribute and suggested some
solutions to beautify or enrich Egypt’s facades,” he wrote.
More than 5,000 people shared a post of eL Seed’s
mission statement on Facebook, and there were hundreds of mostly
positive comments that suggested that he had accomplished his
goals. “Beautiful and honest words,” one woman in Egypt wrote. The
garbage collectors, she added, “deserve our gratitude.”
Officials seemed taken by surprise. The Egyptian
Embassy in Washington promoted the project
on its Twitter feed, and said it was “totally amazed.”
As eL Seed planned the mural over the past year, he was
aided by a local priest, the Rev. Samaan Ibrahim, who is considered
a leader of the mainly Coptic garbage collectors in the
neighborhood. The priest’s approval and participation in the
project in turn brought residents on board, eL Seed said.
The neighborhood was established more than four decades
ago, with its striking location in the shadow of cliffs and fetid
streets making it the most recognizable of several settlements
where the city’s garbage collectors live.
The neighborhood has also received frequent attention
over the years from international aid organizations and
journalists, making it one of the most prosperous settlements, said
Gaétan du Roy, a Belgian researcher who studies the religious lives
of the collectors.
But many of its residents are impoverished and continue
to be regarded as second-class citizens because of their
association with the trash, he said.
Their relations with the government have also been
strained. Officials have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to replace
the garbage collectors and their extensive family networks with
more modernized private companies. In one of the most enduring
shocks to the area, President Hosni Mubarak’s government, reacting
to fears of a swine influnceza epidemic in 2009, decided to kill
all of Eygpt's pigs,
including thousands kept by the garbage collectors, who used them
to consume organic waste and who would also sell their meat.
From the streets of the neighborhood, the painting
appears in fragments: above a courtyard where members of one family
carefully search for recycling in bags of trash, or looming over a
rooftop occupied by a handful of sheep. The bracing scale of the
mural is fully visible only from the Mokattam Hill on the edge of
the district, near a famous cathedral carved inside a cave.
Viewed from there, the colors interrupt the monotonous
red brick facades below, distinguishing these buildings from the
thousands that have sprung up across the city over decades, with
little oversight, to contain Cairo’s bursting population.
In the days after the mural was completed, the
residents of Manshiyat Naser seemed not to focus too closely on its
message: Many people had yet to trek up the hill for a viewing, and
few had any idea what the calligraphy said.
Instead, people seemed moved that eL Seed and his
friends had bothered to travel to Cairo and immersed themselves in
the neighborhood defying the various calamities that have driven
away many visitors to Egypt in the past few years. The only
complaint was that the artists had not painted more of the
houses.
“They used to play with the kids here, and talk to the
people,” said Boutros Ghali, a 24-year-old shopkeeper who placed a
photograph of himself with one of the visitors, a young Algerian,
on the wall of his store. “People loved them, and got used to them.
And when they left, people were upset.”