Caramblogage

This was published on the now- defunct Daily News Egypt Website on the 17th of March 2012.  Caram Kapp is one of the artists that participated in the "Festival of Egyptian Culture" held at the Tutankhamun exhibit in Frankfurt. The below are moments in time picked out of the workshop "Egyptian Street Art and Arabic Graffiti" on April 7-14, 2012. Amidst the skyscrapers of Frankfurt, hidden away near the train station on Güterplatz, stands the tomb of Tutankhamun. More interestingly, in front of that stands a wall, and an out-of use generator building. Over the last few days, terrible things have been happening to this wall, some may say. In the opinion of some others, street artists are painting a mural. Flown in from Egypt, Paris, Berlin and Frankfurt via Sao Paolo, a crew of emerging and established practitioners of the art of mural statements have begun painting a wall. Their names recall comic book heroes: Ammar Abo Bakr, Aya Tarek, Case, El Seed, and Ga...

Coming home also meant having to face another reality, that of the rumor mill of Cairo. Constantly surrounded by people, you can't escape it.  The outline of a body, reminiscent of murder scenes in American movies haunts the front cover of Egypt Today. The headline: "You could be next".  Every evening, I come home at impossible hours. The security guard unlocks the door for me, and we engage in tired conversation. He tells me of his time as a security guard at Apple, military training and Egypts secrets, of weapons on Tahrir and the role of the media. On the nights after Port Said, he also tells me of muggings, daylight robbery and murders and trucks. For half an hour every night, I listen to him, wondering when they started locking the front door at ten before locking myself in the house with a double shot of single malt. I also wonder how much of his information is true, and how much based on hearsay. Our Maid, Shaima', talks along the same lines ...