Street Art of the Arab World on YouTube

posted on: Apr 7, 2013

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The Cairene journalist and blogger Soraya Morayef, who has written extensively about the Egyptian revolution’s graffiti, has produced a series of new video reports on street art of the Arab world, as part of a series for MOCAtv, the YouTube channel of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

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The latest in the series, shot in the West Bank, was posted this week, following earlier reports from Libya and Egypt. A report from Lebanon is scheduled to go live next week.

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Ms. Morayef, who blogs as Suzee in the City, told The Lede that the series was commissioned by the museum based on her work in Egypt.

<blockquote>Luckily, I had been to Beirut and Libya last summer and had met with artists in Beirut and fixers in Tripoli so when they asked me to make these films, I’d already had a good idea of what I wanted to film.

As for Palestine, I’d met a Palestinian woman in Morocco last September who turned out to make graffiti and I later on wrote about her on my blog.

It was an incredibly time-consuming project that required hiring fixers/filmmakers in the respective countries as we had a very tight budget that wouldn’t have covered my traveling to the countries.

It’s worth noting that the Egypt video was made on zero budget with several journalists generously donating their footage, and the Libya’s footage was filmed by a fixer.</blockquote>

Robert Mackey
The New York Times Blogs