Born in a small town on the outskirts of Paris to parents of Tunisian origin, eL Seed (born Faouzi Khlifi, 1981) has painted graffiti on the walls of some of the planet’s most problematic places. In 2017, for example, he worked in the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas, creating an art work eloquently entitled The Bridge, commissioned by the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, he visited the refugee camps in Ain Al-Helweh, in southern Lebanon, where he launched a cooperation project with Palestinian refugees to continue to hand down an ancient embroidery technique from generation to generation. The surfaces on which the writer has created his sinuous ‘calligraffiti’ include the roof of a building in the Brazilian ‘favela’ of Vidigal, part of the Rio de Janeiro conurbation just a stone’s throw from the famous Ipanema beach, where he reproduced the words of the poetess Gabriela Torres Barbosa.
The choice of leaving his mark in frontier territories responds to an urgent need to build metaphoric bridges between different peoples and cultures, particularly between East and West, a completely natural path for someone who, like eL Seed, grew up with a dual identity that is not always easy to bear in the country of forced assimilation and inflammatory banlieues. And his chosen tag, or nickname, also represents the meeting of these two worlds: ‘al-Sīd’ in means “the lord” and “the man” in Arabic, while “seed” refers to the English meaning of the word. His work focuses on a re-interpretation of Arab calligraphy, a very ancient art made contemporary by mixing it with the stylistic features of street art. “Words are very important in what I do, and I am interested in them because they are the most immediate form of communication between two people, apart from a smile,” he tells. “When we learn a new language, we realise that there are words that we understand effortlessly, because they are similar to others that we already know.”
One of the most recent works of the Franco-Tunisian writer, an open-air circuit with seven works dotted around the town of Diriyah, near Riyadh, looks at the issue of cultural identity, a far from monolithic concept that rather resembles an oil painting on which strokes of colour can be added later. “This does not mean that we don’t feel complete. There are however layers of our identity that perhaps in a phase of our lives we are unable to express due to the circumstances,” the artist explains. “I myself am a third culture kid (the first is that of the origin of the parents, the second that of the country of residence, the third the blend of the first two, ed.), and I began to learn and express my parents’ Arab culture only when I was an adolescent, when I learned to read and write in Arabic.”
Waves Only Exist Because the Wind Blows, the huge mural measuring one thousand square metres created in the summer of 2024 on the outer walls of the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, talks of welcoming and the acceptance of differences. The phrase reproduces in Arabic characters is a quotation from a very famous Italian novel,Cesare Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires: “You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it.” The work crosses the Cube, the main body of the museum, in a wave motion, an image that, as eL Seed explains, “is a very powerful metaphor of the exchange between cultures: when it breaks, it leaves a little sand on the shore and takes other sand away with it. That’s what travellers do when they visit a place.”
