- Title: TELEVISION-HOMELAND Artists who made "racist" graffiti on "Homeland" seek changes
- Date: 16th October 2015
- Summary: (SOUNDBITE) (English) ARTIST, HEBA AMIN, SAYING: "When he approached me my first reaction was also that I wasn't interested because at that point I had been boycotting the show. I already knew the reputation it had and I had already knew kind of the flaws and the political stereotyping, so I didn't want to be involved. Until I considered, well, based on previous episodes t
- Embargoed: 31st October 2015 12:00
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- Topics: General
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- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: The artists who produced Arabic graffiti seen in the latest episode of the TV series "Homeland," which accuses the show of racism, said on Friday (October 16) they were surprised at the impact of their protest. They said they hoped it would get the producers to change their scripts.
The hit show is about U.S. intelligence efforts to thwart Middle East terrorism. In the episode aired in the United States last week, CIA agent Carrie Mathison walks through a Syrian refugee camp and past a wall daubed with graffiti - one of which declares, in Arabic: "Homeland is racist".
Other scenes had walls covered with similarly pointed Arabic messages: "There is no Homeland", "Homeland is not a show" and "Black lives matter".
The sabotage of the set has become a worldwide story, picked up by major newspapers and media outlets across the globe.
Artist Heba Amin said she was not initially interested in the work because of the show's reputation.
"I already knew kind of the flaws and the political stereotyping, so I didn't want to be involved. Until I considered, well, based on previous episodes they had made many mistakes and it was clear that they didn't have a strong research team connected to this region. Nobody was checking language, nobody was checking what the cities looked like and so I figured this was the opportunity to incorporate subversive graffiti," Amin told Reuters in Cairo.
The graffiti were planted by a trio of artists calling themselves the "Arabian Street Artists".
They were hired to make walls on the outskirts of Berlin, where the show as filmed this summer, look like part of Lebanon.
Nobody detected the meaning before the show aired on the Showtime network last Sunday.
Alex Gansa, co-creator of "Homeland", said in a statement distributed by Showtime: "We wish we'd caught these images before they made it to air."
But he added: "As 'Homeland' always strives to be subversive in its own right and a stimulus for conversation, we can't help but admire this act of artistic sabotage."
The artists said they were motivated by stereotypes and inaccuracies in the scripts used by the show's producers.
"So they basically indicated where they wanted us to tag, where they wanted us to write the graffiti and then they said you're on your own and so we realised when we started writing these proverbs nobody was paying any attention, nobody asked us, nobody was even curious what we were writing. So then we started being a bit more daring," Amin said.
"We started to improvise from there and it became a bit more explicit. We wanted to address the idea that "Homeland" was racist but it wasn't really about making these kind of very strong political slogans. It was really about undermining the accuracy of the show so we wrote ridiculous things. The content of our graffiti was not as important as putting things that would never appear like "Hashtag: Black Lives Matter", that would never appear in it."
"I think what we are trying to raise is that regardless whether or not the show is fiction, it still has very dangerous implications because they're basically stereotyping an enormous region of people, a very diverse people, a very diverse cultures of Muslims and non-Muslims to an incredibly shallow one dimensional image that has an impact in a very real way and so we wanted to raise attention to the fact that this is not harmless. In fact, quite the opposite," she said.
Among the inaccuracies the three artists - Caram Kapp and Don Karl, in addition to Amin - point to in "Homeland" are episodes that portrayed Al Qaeda as being backed by Shiite Iran, when the group is Sunni-led.
The show, now in its fifth season, had run for so long that it was affecting viewers' perceptions of the Middle East, Kapp said in an interview with Reuters at a cafe in Berlin's artist district, Neukoellnin.
"By doing this for a long time they are forming a certain opinion, a certain representation of this part of the world in their audience's minds who do probably watch it as entertainment and yet, through by watching it, they do begin to have prejudices, they do begin to see people a certain way and the show does colour people from the Middle East and South East Asia in a very black way," he said.
"I hope that what we did leads him (Alex Gansa, co-creator of "Homeland") to maybe interact a bit more with the subject matter and maybe try to represent people in a more differentiated way than he has done hitherto.
"The least we wanted to do with this action was to give everyone a second to pause and laugh together and I think we achieved that," he added.
Claire Danes has won two Emmys and two Golden Globes for her portrayal of agent Mathison, who struggles to do her job while afflicted with bi-polar disorder, but the show has been criticised for inaccuracies and accused of stereotyping in its depiction of the Middle East and Islamic culture. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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