04
ILLUSTRATION

THE TRUTH IS HARD TO HEAR

    
Burning tanks, dark clouds, empty teargas canisters and an angry crowd of protesters, that could be part of a post-apocalyptical resistance unit are occupying Tahrir square in Cairo. On the one side there are the people of Egypt demanding to end the dicatorship of Mubarak and on the other side thugs of pro Mubarak supporters using their extremist aggressions to fuel the fight. The police beating up the innocent, and the army, in the middle of it, not doing anything. That’s the truth, or is it?

Having lived through the revolution solely through digital media (TV, Facebook and Twitter) the urgency and difficulty of telling the truth became omnipresent to me. In the end, i realized, the truth is hard to hear, because my bias was shaped by CNN and the words of my Egyptian dad. Questioning if truth exists at all and what we perceive as the truth, I am taking position as an anti-storyteller in between truth and fiction.

I put together a story that is objectively narrated by the people: Tweets from egyptian bloggers reporting live from the streets of Cairo during the revolution. Alongside the tweets, the story is visualized by a science-fiction thriller. The story aims to unveil how truth, as we know it, mostly is constructed by the bias.