Reaching people on the street by painting isn't always easy, argues Dena Rashed It is crowded, polluted and the traffic is a nightmare. But out there on the wall is a painting of a boy who has a kite which gets lost on the walls. As per the dream of the artist Mohamed Khafagi, the boy dreams and his kite is his way out. It gets lost amid all the chaos of the street but he holds on and tries to reach it. In Sudan Street, in Dokki, Khafagi and his partner Shadi Adib won a competition in 2007 to paint the walls of that busy street. With bright colours, the art work was refreshing. Their project was part of the Plastic Art Salon Festival for the Murals Competition. In 2008, they also painted another wall in Agouza. While both paintings were a needed change to the grim walls of the streets, a couple of years on, the paintings have lost much of their glamour. Posters have been glued on parts of the wall in Sudan Street, and phone numbers have been scrabbled on parts as well. When a bridge was being built near the wall, Khafagi says part of the painting was ruined. "The whole point of such paintings is to get close to the people and bring art down to the streets," he says. But what upsets him the most is the writings that people leave on the wall. It is one hazard of the job, as he puts it, but working in the street means accepting the consequences of public reaction. On a positive note, Khafagi deals with this problem using humour. "I take the people's writing or colouring as an addition to the painting." The murals were supposed to spread all over the city but the project came to a halt three years ago and what is left are just a few murals that need retouches. As Khafagi says, the mural in Agouza by the Nile was ruined during the 25 January Revolution. As for the one on Sudan Street, pollution has highly affected it, "although nothing would clean up like a water hose, which was the governorate's job." Another artist, Abdallah Sabri, who has studied arts and is a fashion photographer as well, believes it has to do with the culture of the people. Lately Sabri has been involved in commercial graffiti for private companies and decorative purposes. He has seen how art is becoming part of the streets in Cairo through individual efforts. Different to the murals done by professionals, the graffiti is becoming a fashionable trend. "Some people have a concept and a technique and that brings up wonderful graffiti to the people, yet the problem is when people don't have a good technique." He goes back to the idea of graffiti and how it is all about delivering a message. "In the US it started by people airbrushing their names and then their problems, and at one point it was a crime to paint on the walls of the streets until it became a well known art of self-expression. People mainly painted on the trains because it helped spread their messages." In Egypt, he thinks that the recent decorating of the streets using stencils is the easiest form because most of the work needed for this idea is done at home. Then the person just sprays on the stencil and sees his art work on the wall. Although he thinks graffiti with its modern look has arrived in Egypt, and has increased after the revolution, Sabri says the Pharaohs have been carving their hearts out on the wall for ages. One downside to working on the streets is the quality of the tools. "We don't have high quality airbrushes available and in many of the graffiti artists use car paint which doesn't necessarily give them good enough pieces." Murals or graffiti, the whole point of the paintings and the colour is to deliver a message to the people and get closer to their minds and hearts. Yet as Sabri argues, it might take years to change people's attitudes about preserving and tasting beauty in arts. "We need to change how people think about art so that they would eventually be able to understand the value of the paintings on the walls and see them as their own," he says. "It all starts when a little boy draws on the wall in his house. Do we wait and see what he is trying to express? Do we give him a chance to develop his art or provide him with an alternative? Parents usually shout at him for ruining a wall but there could be a great taste for art in that kid."
