Word on the Streets

Contemporary artist eL Seed has been climbing high around the kingdom spreading his unique message of love, peace and togetherness.

He is making an impression around the world with a series of masterful yet moving street murals and believes by adding a touch of colour to Bahrain’s urban skyline he can celebrate the kingdom’s diversity through art.

The 35-year-old Tunisian, whose real name is Fawzi but is better known by his tag, was commissioned by the $2.5 billion Bahrain Bay development to beautify three of its bare utility buildings with his celebrated style of combining Arabic calligraphy with graffiti, which, understandably often gets labelled as ‘calligraffiti’.

Gagan Suri, the CEO of Bahrain Bay, was captivated by the street artist’s work after hearing about his artistic endeavours and checking out his style that he flew him into the kingdom to enhance the development’s empty spaces.

“When I looked at the development I noticed we had these three empty buildings that were really ugly, stark and absolutely naked,” he explained. “They were like
huge canvases screaming ‘please come do something with us’.

“When I started researching what we could do I came across several artists and eL Seed was one of them. I emailed him and told him that I wanted to touch base with him. He called me back, said he was living in Dubai but had never been to Bahrain.

I ended the conversation right there and sent him a ticket! The following week he was here, he saw the space and it all started to take shape.

“Promoting art and culture has been an integral part of our overall vision for the project and we wanted to bring art not only to Bahrain’s skyline but also within the development itself.

“Besides enhancing the landscape of Bahrain Bay, I believe the poetic murals by eL Seed will leave a lasting impression on the minds of every viewer, be it a message for those who can decipher the script, or a harmonious amalgamation of colour, shape and patterns that are inclined to evoke ones senses.”

eL Seed chose verses from Bahraini Ali Al Sharqawi’s poem about love for one’s home to cover the brown and grey walls. He said: “I wanted to unify people with this piece. This project is part of a new urban landscape where everything is so vertical and the paintings on these spaces were for me to bring art to the public.

“I chose to use Ali’s poem, which was written 15 years ago, because it became a famous song that many people know and relate to. I wanted to write the poem horizontally because that is what I feel in Bahrain.

I feel like people are all at the same level here - horizontally. You can have your own religion and culture here and nobody is going to look at you or judge you for anything and this is what I wanted to convey in the metaphor of my art.”

This feeling of welcoming diversity was not something that eL Seed personally witnessed whilst growing up in the French capital of Paris. At the age of 14 he faced racism and started dabbling in graffiti, mainly tagging his name on walls around the neighbourhood.

When he was a few years older, he realised that the street art could be used as a way to properly express himself, particularly his identity. eL Seed said: “I have been painting since I was a child but I had an identity crisis when I was a teenager and never really felt French, although I grew up there and never really felt Tunisian as I didn’t know how to read or write Arabic.

“That’s when I went back to my Arabic roots and ironically the Arabic calligraphy is what made me accept my French identity which is something I totally rejected 10 years ago.

“Everything I draw has meaning. I try to use messages that are relevant to the place I’m painting so that people can connect to it, not only the community but also people from outside, so I make sure that there is a universal dimension on it.”

It was only seven years ago that the business graduate quit a secure consultancy career to take up his passion for art full time and now his spectacular designs can be spotted in the US streets of New York as well as in the Brazilian slums of Rio-deJaneiro and those in South Africa’s Cape Town.

All his work conveys one purpose - to bring people, culture and generations together. eL Seed is used to stencilling and painting on a huge-scale having, for example, drawn on an entire minaret of a mosque in Tunisia and on the roof of a house in a favela also known as a slum in Brazil.

His eye-catching displays have brought smiles to people’s faces at the Pont des Art bridge in Paris, at Salwa Road in Qatar’s capital Doha and in the Saudi Arabian Old Town of Jeddah to name but a few.

His most remarkable art venture is titled ‘Perception’ and is painted across a cluster of 50 buildings in Zareeb that can be viewed in its entirety from Egypt’s Moqattam Mountain in South-eastern Cairo.

His colourful creations also led him to design motifs for French fashion house Louis Vuitton. Besides hosting a talk at the celebrated ‘ideas conference’ TED Summit, he also authored a book called Lost Walls that documented his artistic journey in Tunisia.

Although eL Seed has been called a street artist and calligrapher in the past, he believes that art is universal and he shouldn’t be labelled. He said: “Being an artist and coming from the Arab world everybody wants to give you a label like Arab artist, street artist or calligraphist and so on.

I think it’s important to break out of these boundaries that people are trying to put around you and say no. Art is universal and beauty doesn’t need to be translated.”

Before leaving the island behind, eL Seed freely donated his time and talent to add his brush strokes to a building’s wall in Muharraq located nearby the heritage houses belonging to the Shaikh Ebrahim bin Mohammed Al Khalifa Centre for Culture and Research upon the request of his friend Shaikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa, the founder and head of the centre’s board of trustees.

The words behind its grand design say ‘Beauty saves the world’ and thanks to eL Seed’s positivity, it will hopefully heal the world too. He plans to return to the kingdom in January to take part in the centre’s 15th anniversary celebrations.