Perfumed With Mint

The facade of the building at Hakfort 42 is painted with the large scale mural painting “Perfumed with Mint” by Egyptian artist Ammar Abo Bakr. Ammar Abo Bakr is one of the muralists and graffiti activists who took on the streets in 2011 during the Egyptian Revolution later betrayed. Bakr had been working before as a fine arts assistant professor , but decided to take up graffiti activism and street art during the uprisings. His political graffiti work was done on Mohamed Mahmoud Street and other places in Cairo, and often white-washed by authority forces due to its provocative and critical content.

Bakr was invited to Bijlmer by the art initiative R.U.A. and UrbanArtNow to paint the modernist facade. “Perfumed with Mint” is executed in a classical, figurative, painterly style. The title refers to a film of the same name by Egyptian director Mohamed Hamdy, for which at the time he worked as a production designer. Bakr drew parallels between the film in the making, and the story of the buildings inhabitants “about the search for a common identity in times of uncertain developments.” The artists based the composition on a still frame of the film, combining it with additional elements. The outside of the residential building now shows a dreamy domestic situation. The scenery, changing between real and unreal, is full of everyday objects, which are meant to relate to memories of childhood, his own, but, according to the artist, also to those of people passing by.