Tuesday, December 20, 2011

A call to action

"This is an appeal to help save lives."

The prominent street-artist Ganzeer recently announced the Mad Graffiti Week initiative encouraging people in Egypt and beyond to take to the streets from January 13-25 to raise awareness about the situation in Egypt: "Our only hope right now is to destroy the military council using the weapon of art."

As I

I haven't actually seen the posters on the streets of Cairo, but they have been circulating online. Get ready.
http://ganzeer.blogspot.com/2011/12/mad-graffiti-week-jan-13-25-appeal-to.html


This is an appeal to help save lives. The Egyptian Military Council has unleashed a brutal crackdown on peaceful protests by the Egyptian people, calling for the resignation of the military council and a cancellation of the sham elections that they’ve been running under their supervision. Soldiers have shown us no mercy, hitting fallen women with their batons, stomping on skulls with their boots, and shooting unarmed civilians dead. I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes and was unable to stop it. It’s a soul-shattering pain like no other.
The lies being disseminated by military-controlled media are as equally painful. Nothing hurts more than such shameless injustice. I fear the military’s strategy will only lead my country to an armed civil war. In an effort to keep our struggle peaceful, I hear by call on artists everywhere to support the Egyptian revolution with their art. As the genius that is Alan Moore once said, “[a satire] destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing."
Our only hope right now is to destroy the military council using the weapon of art. From January 13 to 25, the streets of Egypt will see an explosion of anti-military street-art. If you are a street artist elsewhere in the world, please do what you can in your city to help us. Even if you are not a street-artist. If you’re a comicbook artist, a musician, or filmmaker, whatever artistic talent you have can be of big help. If you can do something before the designated date, please do! We need all the help we can get.
Finding “inspiration” is not at all difficult. A quick visit to scaf-crimes.blogspot.com will do the trick. On behalf of Egypt’s street-art community, allow me to thank anybody in the world willing to help. Your art may very well save lives. 



If you need any instruction, here is "a how-to-graffiti guide for those who scheme and those who dream."
http://crimethinc.com/tools/downloads/pdfs/walls_are_alive.pdf


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