Homeland producers hired three street artists to add authenticity to scenes set inside a Syrian refugee camp. They were allowed to write whatever they wanted in Arabic, as long as it was apolitical, but no one bothered to translate the graffiti. Otherwise, they would have known it says, “Homeland is racist,” “Homeland is NOT a series,” and personal favorite, “Homeland is watermelon.”
The artists, Amin, Caram Kapp, and Stone, released a statement following Sunday’s episode, explaining in “June 2015, we received a phone call from a friend who has been active in the Graffiti and Street art scene in Germany for the past 30 years and has researched graffiti in the Middle East extensively. He had been contacted by Homeland’s set production company who were looking for ‘Arabian street artists’ to lend graffiti authenticity to a film set of a Syrian refugee camp on the Lebanese/Syrian border for their new season.”
During a two-day set decoration period, rather than the expected pro-President Bashar al-Assad graffiti, they instead wrote “there is no Homeland,” “#blacklivesmatter,” and “Homeland is a joke, and it didn’t make us laugh” to protest the show’s “chain of causality with Arabs.”
“It’s very important for us to address the idea that this kind of stereotyping is very dangerous because it helps form people’s perceptions of an entire region, a huge region, which in turn affects foreign policy,” Amin told the Washington Post. “It was a way to claim back our image.” (Via)
They also threw in a “ROSS IS NOT COOL.” That message transcends languages.
(Via the Guardian)
