CAIRO, EGYPT (OCTOBER 16, 2015) (REUTERS - ACCESS ALL) (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 they had made many mistakes and it was clear that they didn’t have a strong research team connected to the region. Nobody was checking language, nobody was checking what the cities looked like and so I figured maybe this was the opportunity to incorporate subversive graffiti.” (SOUNDBITE) (English) ARTIST, HEBA AMIN, SAYING: “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. 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.” (SOUNDBITE) (English) ARTIST, HEBA AMIN, SAYING: “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.” (SOUNDBITE) (English) ARTIST, CARAM KAPP, SAYING: “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.” (SOUNDBITE) (English) ARTIST, CARAM KAPP, SAYING: “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.” (SOUNDBITE) (English) ARTIST, CARAM KAPP, SAYING: “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.”