eL Seed: Building bridges with Arabic from Korea to Cape Town
eL Seed shunned his Arab roots as a young French man, but later in life discovered the beauty of the Arabic script. Courtesy: eL Seed studio.
“I am an artist with a humanist intention,” said eL Seed in the opening seconds of his TED talk in Banff, Alberta, Canada in June 2016. Choking back tears he explained how he had selected Manshiyat Nasr, a community of garbage collectors who live in a closed district in central Cairo, because they were poor and neglected. He said he wanted to beautify the area and “to shine light on the neighbourhood”. But he concludes the 11-minute presentation with his own personal revelation. “It was not about beautifying a place it was about switching perception and opening a dialogue with communities that we don’t know. We need to question our level of judgement and misconceptions we have of societies based on their differences.”
This mural is painted across around 50 buildings in Cairo. Courtesy: eL Seed studio
Born and raised in Paris to Tunisian parents, eL Seed has been working on public art projects around the world for the past decade. His art uses the Arabic language, which he has modernised into a form of calligraphy that loops and swirls almost to the point of illegibility but that is captivating to all that view it regardless of their level of comprehension. Since the start of his career, he has not been interested in making canvases or small artworks to hang in the walls of galleries and which would bring him commercial success; his goal has been far more idealistic – to build bridges with art and to spread messages of peace and unity across the world. The vision is utopian at best and unrealistic at worst but as his international profile is raised and the places where he works become more prominent, his messages are reaching wider audiences.
He first reached international prominence in 2012 when he painted the minaret of the Jara Mosque in the small coastal town of Gabes, Tunisia. In black paint on a sand-coloured background he wrote out a verse from the Quran, which, in essence, says that God created mankind in different tribes and nations so that they may know each other better. In the following years he travelled to many towns and cities, choosing to paint messages that had a local connection but with universal significance.
eL Seed's Jara Mosque project in his home town of Gabes, Tunisia. On the side of the minaret he wrote the words of a Quranic verse, which shows the true uniting spirit of Islam. Courtesy eL Seed Studio.
On the façade of the L’Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris he painted the words of Stendhal, a 19th-century French writer who said that “love is the miracle of civilizations” and in the slums of Cape Town he wrote a quote by Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible, until it is done.”
On the roof of an art school in the Vidigal Favela in Rio De Janeiro, eL Seed painted the words of Brasilian poet Gabriela Torres Barbosa in a fuchsia pink mural and in Lebanon’s Achrafieh neighbourhood, he painted Amin Rihani’s poetry in a circular pattern. Rihani was the first Arab to write English essays, poetry, novels, short stories, which examined the divisions and parallels between notions of east and west and he published his works in America during the first three decades of the 20th century.
With each project eL Seed takes on, he spends a great amount of time and energy reading and researching to find with the perfect quote.
eL Seed, seen here in the foreground working on his most ambitious project to date, the mural in Cairo. Courtesy of eL Seed Studio.
The Cairo project, completed in March 2016, was his most ambitious project to date because it stretched across the facades of 50 buildings creating a circular mural that could only be seen in its entirety from one viewpoint – at the top of the Mokattam mountain. The metaphorical significance of this relates to the general perception of the Coptic community living inside Manshiyat Nasr. They are known by the rest of Cairenes as ‘zabaleen’, or people of the garbage but it is, in fact, due to their highly efficient system of sorting and recycling 14,000 tonnes of solid daily waste that the city of greater Cairo manages to cope with their rubbish at all. “They are seen as dirty, marginalised and segregated because of their association with the trash but in fact, they are some of the most resourceful people on the planet,” said eL Seed, in an interview.
Considering this, the artist chose a quote from Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, an ancient Coptic priest who wrote: “Anyone who wants to see the light clearly, needs to wipe his eyes first.”
eL Seed seeks to underline the commonalities of human existence with his accessible and meaningful art.
Although he was brought up speaking Arabic at home, it was only the Tunisian dialect and he could neither read or write the classical language. In his early years, he shunned his Arabic roots altogether, desperate to fit into French society and eschewed any type of difference that would stand him apart from his peers. However, as a teenager when he started to reconcile both parts of his identity he began to delve into his own heritage and learned to read and write standard Arabic. It was during this journey that he began to develop his street-art style of calligraphy, which he paints freehand yet in perfect symmetry and with ease.
One of his most recent projects, completed in late 2017 reflects a progression in his career.
HIs looping Arabic script adorned the fence between North and South Korea along the DMZ. Courtesy eL Seed Studio.
In November 2017, eL Seed installed a 43-panel laser-cut aluminium piece on the metal fence that divides the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. Commissioned by the Gyeonggi Museum of Art in Ansan, South Korea it spells out the words of Kim Sowol, a poet from North Korea who died before the country became divided. The poem is a poignant ode to history, memory and loss but it also urges people to remember.
““You may remember, unable to forget:
yet live a lifetime, remember or forget,
For you will have a day when you will come to forget.
You may remember, unable to forget:
Let your years flow by, remember or forget,
For once in a while, you will forget.
On the other hand it may be:
’How could you forget
What you can never forget?’””
“For me, Arabic script is only a medium here; it is just a vehicle to make the link between this divided community and that is what is amazing for me,” said the artist. “Usually Arabic script is not perceived as a tool to unite people – in fact, it is the opposite, people are frightened of what they don’t know and especially anything associated with the Arab world. So, when I was invited by people from the other side of the world to come and create an artwork of this size and in this sensitive area, it was a huge honour for me and, more importantly, for the Arabic language itself.”
And as he continues to push himself and his practice, moving away from spray cans and paintings to work with metal, sculpture and in three dimensions, his idealism does not wane. “I truly believe that art is the only way to keep us together and to remind us all that we are human.”
Crossing boundaries and creating ties is eL Seed's intention as an artist and as a human. Here two people work together on either side of the fence in the DMZ, symbolising the unity that his artwork brings. Courtesy eL Seed Studio.