eL Seed: Calligrafitti } Street Art Meets the Arab Revolution

Born and raised in France from Tunisian parents he always felt a strong connection to his arab-african roots. From here his decision to study Classical Arabis and then Arabic Calligraphy. He now infuses his culture into art, i.e. Arabic into Graffitti.

 

The Classical Arabic calligraphy has a lot in common with modern days grafitti - it plays with letters, distorts them in every way but still the message is at the center. With one very prominent difference: The authos in calligraphy steps behind his work which promulgates mostly quotations from the Quran.

eL Seed’s ‘Calligraffiti’ on Tunisia’s tallest minaret

"This “Calligraffiti” is the product of a double marginality, that of an oriental artist seeking a voice in the occidental world and that of street art struggling to legitimize its presence in the contemporary art scene. This duality enables the reconciliation of two supposedly opposing worlds and two supposedly clashing cultures. eL Seed no longer tags his name on walls, deciding instead to adopt a proverbial tradition in which the art, not the artist, is the sole focus."
Read more in interviews here and here.
Picture credits here and here.