eL Seed

eL Seed is a French-Tunisian calligraphy artist and muralist whose work features the Arabic language through graffiti, a fusion sometimes referred to as calligraffiti. ¹ No source read for this record names a religion or school for him, and none is recorded in his data: the Arabic calligraphy, and the Qur'anic verse he painted on a mosque minaret, are the medium and subject of his work, not an attestation about him. ¹

He was born on 21 August 1981 in Le Chesnay, on the outskirts of Paris, to a Tunisian family; he grew up speaking only the Tunisian dialect and did not learn to read or write standard Arabic until his teens, when he discovered an interest in his Tunisian roots. ¹ As a street artist he took the name elSeed from the French play Le Cid, which his teacher was reading to his class; El Cid in turn derives from the Arabic al-Sayed, "the man". ¹

He cites the 2011 Tunisian Revolution as a major factor in opening political space to other forms of expression: "The revolution pushed people to be more creative because before they were scared — and now they have more freedom." ¹ A year after the revolution he created his first large-scale mural in Kairouan, a calligraphic rendering of a passage from a Tunisian poem dedicated to those struggling against tyranny and injustice. ¹ His influences include graffiti artists and the Arabic poets Mahmoud Darwish and Nizar Qabbani, as the article names them. ¹ Of his method he says: "I always make sure that I am writing messages, but there are also layers of political and social context... The aesthetic is really important, that's what captures your attention, but then I try to open a dialogue that's based on the location and my choice of text." ¹

His most controversial project was the 2012 painting of the minaret of the Jara Mosque in Gabes, in southern Tunisia, undertaken during Ramadan with the approval of the governor of Gabes and the mosque's imam. ¹ The 57-metre mural carries the Qur'anic words "Oh humankind, we have created you from a male and a female and made people and tribes so you may know each other", chosen, he explained, to bring people together and highlight the convergence of art and religion: "I like graffiti because it brings art to everyone. I like the fact of democratizing art." ¹

In Perception (2016), in Cairo's Manshiyat Nasr district, he and his team, with the local community, created an anamorphic piece across almost fifty buildings of the Zaraeeb, the Coptic community that collects the city's trash, visible in full only from a point on the Muqattam hills; it carries words of Saint Athanasius of Alexandria: "Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eye first." ¹ In 2013 the Qatar Museums Authority commissioned him to create a series of 52 artworks in Doha's Salwa Road area. ¹ His art has been exhibited in Berlin, Chicago, Dubai, Paris and São Paulo, and his murals stand in Melbourne, London, Toronto and many Tunisian cities. ¹ His book Lost Walls: a Calligraffiti Journey through Tunisia appeared in 2014, and he is based in Dubai. ¹

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