For Cabaret Crusades: The Path to Cairo, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky reconstructed episodes from the medieval Crusades using approximately 120 handmade clay puppets. The larger trilogy draws on Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, shifting attention toward historical narratives recorded from an Arab perspective.
The choice of puppets makes the work stranger than a conventional historical reconstruction.
A puppet cannot pretend that we are watching reality. We constantly see the mechanism of representation. The figures are obviously artificial, yet they perform events whose consequences were violently real.
That distance interests me.
Film normally tries to make historical reconstruction convincing through costumes, locations and actors. Shawky removes that illusion almost completely. History becomes theatre, and because the manipulation is visible, we start thinking about who is moving the characters.
Perhaps that is appropriate. Historical narratives are also constructed. Events happened, but every retelling involves selection, framing and perspective.
The puppet strings are simply more visible than the ones inside a history book.
