The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Telematch Crusades 2009 is from a series of video works entitled ‘Telematch’. How did it come about? Telematch is a German TV program. As a kid, I lived in Saudi Arabia, in Mecca, and this program was extremely famous there. I think it started in 1978 or 1979 and stopped in 1984. It is a comedy show with two German towns competing with each other, like running in the mud and trying to collect balls. You collect points, and, in the end, one town will be the winner. The set-up is very funny, and it usually had the sense of a clichéd medieval European city, with knights and forts and castles. And, of course, a lot of fairytales are involved. The most beautiful part for me was how you could set up a fake competition to entertain a third party. In our situation, the third party is the art audience. I made many different things about this, with the same idea of Telematch . One is Telematch Sadat 2007. We made a re-enactment of the assassination of Sadat [the assassination of the Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat in 1981], only by kids. Of course, the kids don’t know Sadat or the assassination, and this is the most important part of using kids in all my work — because they don’t have this dramatic memory about anything. They don’t know what it looks like, they just follow what I tell them. It doesn’t leave the value of the work to the skills of the actor. The historical event becomes the main issue. The last film was Telematch Crusades 2009. I was invited to Lamu, Kenya, to see if I could make a project there. I started to collect information from people in the city, and what was very interesting to me was that I heard a story that everyone was saying, that Lamu was controlled by the Arabs, who were trading most of the people like slaves. The Americans then came to Lamu, and they freed it from the leadership of the Muslims. The Arabs came from Yemen and Oman, which is true, of course, as Lamu is mixed between Yemenis, Omanis and the Kenyan people. The rest of the story — that the Americans came to free Lamu — is something really strange. I read later that the Portuguese came, not the Americans. So the people in Lamu were just using a shorthand term for ‘Westerner’? Maybe. I don’t know — I don’t care, really. For me, it was like a fairytale. Because, if you ask anyone, they will tell you the same thing, it’s ‘the Americans [who] came and freed this country from the Arabs, because we were slaves before’. So I decided to make this movie with a hundred kids and a hundred donkeys, a Muslim army with Kenyan Muslim kids, who are besieging a Crusader fort. The work looks at the relationship between the Arab world and Africa, with a mix of fact and fiction; the way that people talk about this history is partly fictionalised as well. By turning the Muslims into Crusaders, rather than Christians, it’s looking at the Crusades from a different perspective. After I heard this story, I started to read Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes 1984. I’m fascinated by novelists who use history as a tool. I found Maalouf interesting because he used all the Arab sources, but at the same time you don’t see that he is talking about something good or bad or right. It’s more like the Telematch point of view: he is trying to put all the information from the other side. He is Christian, but you never feel that he is empathetic with what happened to the Christians, for example. The title of the book makes you feel that there is no truth in history — it’s just different points of view. And I like this; I don’t really believe in history, I just believe in human creation. You have a revolution today and, even with all the means for documenting everything, you still don’t know where the truth is — you are not sure about anything. So after a thousand years you know that one person wrote something and you don’t know who it is exactly — how will I make this as my key to lead me to the definite truth? It’s impossible. With these historical recreations you are making, is that how you see them in relation to the present? Yes, part of them is trying to analyse the present, and how we write history. I am more fascinated with how we put history into a readable form. This is much more interesting to me than history itself. Interviewed by Russell Storer, April 2012. WAEL SHAWKY An interview 246