{"id":13239,"date":"2015-05-10T01:54:07","date_gmt":"2015-05-10T05:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=13239"},"modified":"2015-05-10T01:54:07","modified_gmt":"2015-05-10T05:54:07","slug":"el-seed-playing-with-the-arabic-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/el-seed-playing-with-the-arabic-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"eL Seed: Playing with the Arabic\u00a0Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

via the always excellent Arabic Literature (in English)<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

BY MLYNXQUALEY<\/a><\/span><\/span> on<\/em> 0<\/a> )<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

On Thursday, May 7, Tunisian-French artist eL Seed joined artist-publisher Don Karl at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair to talk about his work in Calligraffiti:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"never\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Among all the painting work that eL Seed did in a recent tour around Tunis, Don Karl said, the most controversial piece had nothing to do with religious or political authorities. It was in the now-famous village of\u00a0Tatouine.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause some Star Wars fans were not happy,\u201d Don Karl said.<\/p>\n

\n

After traveling around the area, and discovering an ancient Roman city nearby, eL Seed said he grew frustrated with the \u201ccultural heritage\u201d status of the Star Wars set, which seemed to dwarf the status of all other \u2014 much older \u2014 heritage sites.\u00a0He said he thought: \u201c\u2018You know what, I\u2019m going to go to the film set, and I\u2019m just going to kill it.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to do a real vandal piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he arrived, he was given permission to paint on the walls of the abandoned film set, but\u00a0\u201cI think that was the fastest wall that I ever did in my life, because I thought\u00a0he was going to change his mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

The message he wrote on the Tatouine\u00a0wall means:\u00a0\u201cI will never be your son.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Tunisian artist, who grew up in France, said that it was his distance from Arabic that allowed him to play with the shapes of the letters.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I had known Arabic since I was five or six, I wouldn\u2019t be able to break the rules.\u201d He learned to read and write when he was eighteen \u201cto escape my French identity,\u201d as some in France had made him feel he wasn\u2019t French.\u00a0But the process of embracing his Tunisian identity, and inventing his own ways of doing calligraphy, also brought him back to embracing his French-ness, about which he spoke about in more depth with Olivia Snaije, below.<\/p>\n

eL Seed\u00a0clarified in his Abu Dhabi talk that he doesn\u2019t do the \u201ccorrect\u201d sort of calligraphy: \u201cI\u2019m not a calligrapher. I\u2019m just a graffiti artist painting in Arabic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Olivia Snaije also interviewed eL Seed in a piece that originally appeared in the\u00a0<\/em>Show Daily\u00a0and on\u00a0<\/em>Publishing Perspectives:<\/p>\n

By Olivia Snaije<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIn the end, painting is simply a pretext to meet the other. The curves that I paint in the street are an invitation to passersby to talk and share,\u201d writes Franco-Tunisian street artist eL Seed, in his book Lost Walls<\/em>, a Calligraffiti journey through Tunisia.<\/p>\n

\"lost_walls_300\"eL Seed, whose nom de plume was inspired by Pierre Corneille\u2019s 17th-century play Le Cid<\/em>, and the Arabic word el sayed<\/em>, was born and raised in Paris by parents who had emigrated from Tunisia. He grew up speaking Tunisian Arabic but it wasn\u2019t until he was 19 and examining the perplexing condition of being bi-cultural, that he took up studying literary Arabic in search of his identity. It was in the beauty of the curves of Arabic script and the poetry of the language that eL Seed slowly found his calling, first using it in street art in France, later in New York and Montreal.<\/p>\n

He had always drawn as a child, but art classes were too expensive and it was not a field that was particularly acceptable to an immigrant family working hard to get ahead.<\/p>\n

Armed with a business degree from a prestigious French institution, eL Seed was hired by a firm in New York in 2006.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt kills you, but it helped me because I prayed to get out of this kind of work,\u201d he said, referring to the corporate milieu. He began painting on weekends as relief from his relentless office work hours and eventually left the business world behind to concentrate on his painting. In 2007 social media was gaining importance and eL Seed said his work would not have had the same impact so quickly 20 years ago: social media played an important role in promoting his painting. (Today, the additional platforms of Instagram or YouTube provide street art with even more visibility.)<\/p>\n

Developing a technique that New York art dealer Jeffrey Deitch coined in the 1980s as \u201cCalligraffiti,\u201d eL Seed was even closer to this concept than Deitch could have imagined at the time, because of the use of Arabic calligraphy in all his work, whether it was painting a verse from \u201cAt the Top of a Hill\u201d by Brazilian poet Gabriela Torres Barbosa on a favela wall in Rio or a quotation by Nelson Mandela on a wall in Cape Town.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first, in Rio, people didn\u2019t understand \u2014 they had never seen Arabic calligraphy before. Then when I explained, they were pleased,\u201d said eL Seed. \u201cIn Cape Town they were intrigued. The fact that I paint in Arabic creates a dialogue, not a clash. It invites an opening. This is what makes this script magical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although eL Seed had been on a search for his own identity, and certainly his book, which follows street art that he created throughout Tunisia is deeply personal; his work is determinedly universal as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first, there wasn\u2019t a real thought process involved. Today, it\u2019s a process of sharing. My messages are always sensitive to the local environment, but they all have a universal dimension to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2013, when eL Seed was invited to paint the side of La Tour 13, an apartment building slated to be torn down which became the site for an ephemeral exhibition of international street art, he used a line from a poem by Baudelaire,\u00a0\u2018The shape of the city changes faster than people\u2019s heart\u2019, which he translated into Arabic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt almost sounded better in Arabic,\u201d said eL Seed. \u201cThere\u2019s dimension, power and beauty in Arabic, and a liberty and dynamic in the script that touches the eye before you even read what is written. When people tell me that they don\u2019t understand what is written, I say you have to appreciate it like you would appreciate music in a foreign language \u2014 as a universal language.\u201d<\/p>\n

The catalyst for the Lost Walls project began following the 2012 riots at an art exhibition near Tunis, which Islamists deemed insulting. \u201cThis event sparked numerous debates concerning freedom of expression and the place of the artist in Tunisian society,\u201d wrote eL Seed in Lost Walls. He asked the imam of the Jara mosque in Gab\u00e8s, where his family is from, whether he could decorate the nearly 50-meter minaret. Several months later he painted a verse from the Koran on it, which he hoped was a message of tolerance and acceptance of others: \u201cO mankind, we have created you from male and female, and have made you into people and tribes so that you may know each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to show the different facets of Tunisia,\u201d said eL Seed, concerning his book. He painted on a white clay dome above a caf\u00e9 on the island of Djerba, where he researched the Jewish and Berber communities, he decorated an ephemeral wall in Raf Raf, in northern Tunisia, and on a rock in the arid Tatouine village, which lent its name to a fictional planet in Star Wars.<\/p>\n

Although street art became an important means of expression throughout the Arab Spring, eL Seed does not consider himself to be political and has no intention of being put in a box or being used for one cause or another. \u201cJust because I am Tunisian and paint in Arabic, people like to put a label on me. I have absolutely no agenda,\u201d he says. \u201cI am here to bring people and communities together.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Dubai he has been experimenting with another medium, this time in 3D \u2014 sculptural calligraphy in fiberglass. Taking inspiration from a poem by Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, which describes the beauty of a lover despite her age, eL Seed used the poem to declare his love for the art of ancient calligraphy.<\/p>\n

Besides developing his sculpture and creating installations, he also writes poetry (in French) and enjoys writing in general.<\/p>\n

After his challenging search for his identity, and the difficulty of learning Arabic, he sees the wealth in being multicultural. \u201cGoing back to my roots allowed me to be French as well. I understood this when I recently bought my football jersey for the French national team.\u201d<\/p>\n

The artist\u00a0was interviewed for the Fair\u2019s <\/em>Show Daily,\u00a0and the piece also appeared in\u00a0<\/em>Publishing Perspectives.\u00a0<\/em>Olivia Snaije is a journalist, editor, writer and occasional translator based in Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n

You can find more of the artist\u2019s work at\u00a0elseed-art.com<\/a>\u00a0and more about the books Don Karl publishes at\u00a0fromheretofame.com\/<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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