Art Box #9: ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE MUNDANE: SPRING AFFAIR by Khaled Hafez

We hear the fighter jets before we see anything. The low mechanical growl that has become part of the global background noise of the 21st century is as intimidating as it is familiar. Somewhere between news broadcast atmosphere, military parade spectacle, and the soundscape of WWIII, always allegedly around the corner. Then the title appears: Illustrated History of the Mundane: Spring Affair. In so many parts of the world, war really has become mundane. It’s no longer rare enough to shock. Not distant enough to feel historical either — so much for the end of history. Instead, it has been folded into everyday visual culture. Tanks, drones, missile footage, tactical graphics, and loops of documented destruction now move through the same screens as memes, recipes, weather updates, they're all part of our bedtime doomscrolling. Welcome to the world Khaled Hafez builds from humble materials and loaded histories — cardboard, glue, propaganda, and the kind of lore that is almost too much to carry.

At first, they almost look playful — small white forms shaped like cannonballs balancing on tiny legs, carrying sniper rifles as they march across a red dashed line stretching endlessly through the frame. The line reads simultaneously as border, trajectory, wound, migration route, ceasefire map, or blood trail. The figures keep advancing across rough cardboard surfaces like some strange military hieroglyphic procession.

We hear the repetitive sound of marching. It evokes Boots by Rudyard Kipling — that infamous colonial poem written during the Second Boer War, where endless marching turns language itself into machinery: Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up and down again! There’s no discharge in the war! The poem, written in 1903, gained a reputation for its psychologically exhausting rhythm, and recordings of it were reportedly used in parts of military survival training because of the way its repetition reproduces mental fatigue and claustrophobia. And in the context of Egypt, those colonial echoes become difficult to separate from the image. British occupation profoundly shaped Egypt’s infrastructure throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: railways, barracks, shipping routes, military logistics, administrative systems, and extractive industries. Colonial power did not arrive only through flags or ideology but also through the circulation of troops, cargo, through engineered movement, the constant expansion of routes and control. In Hafez’s animation, movement itself feels militarized. The marching never really leads anywhere. It simply sustains the system.