Sheikhs and Llamas (discussing Wael Shawky's "Al Araba Al Madfuna")

Wael Shawky's exhibition titled "Al Araba Al Madfuna" is a showcase of several of his works including The Cabaret Crusades series as well as Al Araba Al Madfuna and Al Araba Al Madfuna II. Shawky is extremely focused on the idea of storytelling, he says he is less interested in history and more in how we as humans interpret and re-tell that history. The Cabaret Crusades are Shawky's adaptations of Amin Maalouf's book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, which is a narrative retelling that exposes the Arab side of the Crusades. In the first Cabaret Crusades film titled The Horror Show File (2010), Shawky incorporates the use of 200 year old wooden marionettes from the Lupi collection in Italy to re-tell events up to the fall of Jerusalem in 1099.

In the second, titled The Path to Cairo (2012), Shawky this time created 110 ceramic marionettes in his own style, with help from puppeteers and ceramists from Italy and France. This time we witness a re-telling of events that happened between the first and second crusades. He says that "when you work with marionettes, you do not depend on acting skills. These are not the priority. The priority is the value of the event." He also enlisted the help of Serbian mathematician and geographer Matrakci Nasu, to help create the sceneography. Shawky says he was trying to create something like a pop-up book, to create a mix between the 3D of the marionettes and the 2D of the background. He says this is because in Muslim manuscripts, the paintings were "very flat" with "no perspective" and authenticity is extremely important to him. In this pursuit of authenticity, Shawky also travelled to Bahrain in search of people to sing a specific type of music called Fidjeri, which was created by the pearl fishers of the Gulf Region over 800 years ago. The Path to Cairo also features the voice of Ali Hammadi, a very famous "Radood", which is a special reciter that sings religious stories.

The first Al Araba Al Madfuna and Al Araba Al Madfuna II are visually very different to the Cabaret Crusades series, but is extremely similar in intentions. Shawky uses children dressed as adults, dubbed with adult voices to re-tell Mohamed Mustagab's parables, mixed with his own experiences to create a multi-layered story. The first, calls upon Mustagab's tale of a tribe who continually changed it's entire state  of being to comply with the leader's final words, always along the lines of "I advice you to get a ___". They do so with camels, mules and pigs before the story ends. Shawky couples this with his own experience in the village of Al Araba Al Madfuna, where he witnessed so called "Sheikhs" who are something like spiritual shamans who can sense where the tombs of the old Egyptians are buried. Al Araba Al Madfuna, the village, is on the same hill under which a temple for the ancient Egyptian God Osiris was discovered at the beginning of the 20th Century. In interviews Shawky talks about how if a Sheikh senses something, the family begins digging at once. He says that "sometimes a whole generation dies and the next one has the same dream and continues, so they can definitely dig for twenty years in the same spot." The message Shawky is trying to convey through these multi-layered stories, is that culture and tradition is important but that there is always two sides to a story. You must not become so enthralled with your own culture's ways that you cannot see the ways of others. He does this by having wars narrated by marionettes and wise old voices coming from children's bodies to tell us magical fables. Shawky says in interviews about working with children that "theirs is a more neutral society, they don't have cliches or preconceptions for history. They don't know how to they're supposed to act." In this sense, they are similar to the marionettes; shawky can talk to us through them without interference. He is giving us a raw, authentic storytelling of the crusades through Arab eyes.