Kidlat Tahimik
Filmmaker, writer, visual artist and actor
Bahia Shehab
Multidisciplinary artist, designer, political activist, historian and professor at the American University in Cairo
Vision for the Next 50
In the Next 50… Films and images convey and celebrate local histories and heritage, using metaphors that correspond to their own context and narratives.
In the Next 50… Education in schools raises awareness of the value of heritage and its protection. Civil society, private actors, international communities and government work together to create this awareness and support preservation work.
Summary
The dialogue between Kidlat Tahimik and Bahia Shehab was mainly about celebrating local narratives to move towards a balanced representation of heritage. The two artists noted that popular culture today is greatly influenced by the West and overlooks the narratives of decolonized countries. It is time to look at their own histories and cultures to tell stories that reflect the true experiences of the global south, free from stereotypes, distortion and under-representation.
As an independent filmmaker from the Philippines, Kidlat described how his work is inspired by metaphors and stories of his own region, distinctively different from the West’s. Bahia emphasized the pivotal role education can play in raising awareness of heritage preservation. She also called for a global alliance to enable civil society, private communities, international organizations and government to exchange knowledge and to cooperate for heritage preservation.
Dialogue
I see you are multidisciplinary – you’re a professor, a designer, a calligrapher. You're from the Middle East and when I think of your advocacy for heritage through your various activities, how are these affected by the conflicts in the region? Surely with your own, intangible ‘arms’, your own intangible ‘ammunition’ from art, you must find a way to help. Do these conflicts harm your heritage approach?
Yes, though I think the worry about losing the Pyramids is a global worry, not just for people living in Egypt! I grew up in Lebanon during what people call the civil war and we don't call the Middle East the Middle East anymore. As historians, we refer to it as SWANA (South West Asian/North African) because we believe ‘Middle East’ is a colonial term, and we are trying to decolonize the region in different ways. But to address your question, I lived during the war in Lebanon, so I really saw first-hand the physical destruction of tangible and intangible heritage and what it can do to society. It can destroy the social fabric and it disconnects generations from each other. So for children growing up with their parents or their grandparents and their extended family, this really impacts their identity. We saw the extremism that was going on in Europe because of the loss of identity, because people are uprooted and disconnected from where they come from.
We also have the loss of lives, which leads to the loss of knowledge. Even when people are not killed, they are displaced; it breaks their ties with their society and the knowledge they gained or produced. And that society is also lost, which is another big problem.
The damage is also inflicted on the educational and research infrastructures, and again, the chain of accumulated knowledge that is supposed to be passed on from one generation to the next is severed. And the more visible damage is the damage to the physical loss of heritage – God forbid, the Pyramids – but unfortunately, growing up in Lebanon, I did see the disappearance of heritage, and now in Syria, Iraq and Palestine. Unfortunately we have seen systematic erasure of our history. The minaret of Aleppo that was bombed in 2013 was a culmination of Mediterranean heritage, not just Arab heritage. So it impacts all of us, not just people living in the region. And this is irreplaceable.
In general, instability impacts World Heritage in its many facets. But I would like to highlight the impact on culture with my question to you, because since your first feature film, Perfumed Nightmare, in 1977 – which was the year I was born, so it's 45 years old now, and I'm really honoured to be talking to you about this! – you have explored post-colonialism from the perspective of the global south, to which we both belong. How does storytelling through these protagonists contribute to a balanced representation of history, in your perspective?
Okay. Uh, those words, ‘globalization’ and ‘neo-colonization’, let me break away from them because they already have many connotations. Let me just answer by speaking of my connection to and my appreciation of the old heritage that we have.
As the starting point for an artist, it's not the theoretical frameworks but a simple thing to start with. I have been living with a tribe, the Igorot tribe here, and they're the people who built the rice terraces 3,000 years ago – just imagine a stairway to the gods, but they're all green. Depending on the season – when it's harvest, they all turn yellow. Now all the kids in that area, they’re taught in the curriculums that this is ‘the eighth wonder of the world. Bravo eighth wonder!’ And I say, ‘oh God, that's a starting point!’ Because some historians or somebody who framed the first seven now says you’re eighth, is that correct? That's wrong. We have to neutralize that starting point. And so I tell the kids, ‘Hey, just know that this is the first wonder of the world.’ Maybe our rice terraces are older than the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China. It's not the competition, but just think of it as first, that's a good starting point. When you start telling stories in your paintings or in your sculptures, this is one way to make the starting point start the other way.
A good example – I like to start with mythology because you know we're invaded by all these superheroes. A lot of the kids know Spiderman’s middle name and they know the birthday of these guys, but they know very little about and forget their own mythology.
One of my favourite stories is about Inabyan, the Goddess of the Wind in Ifugao. She had a back strap loom and was weaving a piece of cloth when the gods decided to test her. The wind started blowing her around, but because she had a back strap, like a seatbelt, she survived the test. And so the gods made her Goddess of the Wind. Today whenever a typhoon goes to their village, people pray to her, ‘Inabyan please change the direction of the typhoon, please spare our village.’
In my new narrative, this Goddess of the Wind is confronted by another, the goddess of the wind of Hollywood [Marilyn Monroe]. Everybody knows her, and maybe because of that international fame, maybe Inabyan can ride on her fame. But in my narrative that flowing skirt is coming from the winds of Inabyan and it's really saying ‘okay, we have enough of your Hollywood stories! Let us be! We have our own beautiful myths and tales that we can start with.’ These are little ways in which we can get our young people curious again about their heritage. You know in the Philippines, we’ve had a long history of colonization. As one writer said, ‘we Filipinos have lived three centuries in a Spanish convent and 50 years in Hollywood.’
That resonates with the Arab world! There are a lot of parallels. We’ve also been colonized. I wanted to bring up this point of colonization and how it has damaged the social fabric. And what you are doing is brilliant. Because this is part of the problem. We don't have our own narratives, our own stories. Our children have been reading and consuming this Hollywood narrative that is shoved down our throats in movie theatres, on the radio – in my region, for the past 150 years. So how do you dismantle that? How do we break it down and make people more aware? Because some people don't see themselves as colonized.
No, you have to make them aware that there is something beautiful in our past. And what is cool coming from the West or from Hollywood, we have to let that go.
But how do you do that when you have huge media machines working? In our part of the world, talking about Hollywood, we have been portrayed as the villains! If you look at the history of cinema and the portrayal of Arabs – you know, the big noses, the oppressed veiled women, they're coming to ‘free us’ from the patriarchy. It's all of these narratives. People here think blonde hair and blue eyes are more beautiful than brown hair and eyes!
As a child, we used to watch those cowboy movies, the Lone Ranger and Tonto his Indian sidekick and all of us, we wanted to play the Lone Ranger because he was the hero with the blazing guns…
Of course!
It’s only over the years that we begin to see that our self-esteem has been affected by these racial stereotypes.
Definitely, and how do we build this awareness of cultural heritage for the future? I have several ideas, but I would like to hear like your point of view. Of course, we're both in education and education is key – this is where we start – but how can we think of other structures that can tackle this issue?
We found that many young people’s parents were already brainwashed into this idea that ‘it’s cool out there and we have to be like them’. You have to break that by finding our stories, such as Inabyan and her fascinating ability to be a guardian of culture. I try to emphasize this symbolically. I always tell my students ‘Hey, stop being copycats of Hollywood. Bring out your bamboo camera.’ It's a symbolic way for the young people to say, ‘we can tell our own stories.’ The bamboo camera is from the point of view of our side. History has been told by Western historians, and we are so used to quoting page eight of that book in that archive in the West, and then we forget our own little histories. Maybe our oral histories can themselves become part of our storytelling. This is where we have to dig a little deeper. But of course the money people just want to hire those directors who can do the Filipino Spiderman.
I think the problem is bigger. Thank you for making this point. They want to hire the other, bigger, different international experts. And I think our governments need to create awareness among our citizens. I think we should create awareness in our governments of the importance of preserving our tangible and intangible heritage, because it's only through this awareness that heritage is preserved. And so with all the narrative of decolonizing – we really need to start with our governments and go down from there. And the international community needs to come into conversation with local communities to provide exchange of knowledge and access to knowledge and tools of culture preservation.
I think the countries who have colonized have the responsibility now to give support, return artefacts and play an active role in addressing the damage they have inflicted. And we need to build more infrastructures for understanding and disseminating what cultural heritage preservation is.
What you're doing is wonderful. I would like to see it in schools all over the Arab world. I would like to see awareness about cultural preservation in curriculums. It needs to become part of our mainstream discourse. It's only through knowledge that people will understand the value of heritage and its importance. And it's the role of government, the private sector, the education sector, the civil community. We should all come together and create a way forward.
A question – do you perceive a disconnect between heritage and the creative industries or the private sector in the Philippines? Can they work together to enhance the appreciation of heritage among domestic as well as international audiences? Because it's not just our image of ourselves, but also how we present ourselves to the world. Are we copycats or do we own our identity and present it on a global platform?
Well, it's very tempting to be a copycat.
It's easy!
Because the curators there, from that biennale or from that film festival, are looking for the usual things that maybe impressed us as colonized consumers of their art products. When we become that, there is a disconnect and that's why the commercial filmmakers say, ‘We'll do a Filipino Spiderman or a Filipina Wonder Woman.’
It's the same in Arab cinema. They take a Hollywood movie and they just translate it. The same is happening in our part of the world.
But for us, for the independent artist, we can try and bridge it by saying, ‘We have our own stories.’ Somebody like Inabyan, the Goddess of the Wind, we put them in the forefront and make them something we can identify with. Of course, everything now is laser guns and all these magical things, but if you humanize your mythological characters….
And ancient Egypt is full of gods – we have nothing but gods in ancient Egypt!
Yes! And so our use of metaphors is so different from the precision of those image-makers from the West, who try to make the blood more bloody than it is. We find our own ways of telling stories.
Watch the dialogue
Explore other sessions
Five dialogue sessions covering five themes take place in 2022, each joined by thinkers in paired dialogue from diverse regions. The interdisciplinary dialogues inspire new visions for the next 50 years of World Heritage.
