Yesterday I heard secondhand about eL Seed, a French Tunisian artist (and TED Fellow) whose project, writ large, is to shift perception and, in so doing, foster hope and peace. He does so by fusing "Arabic calligraphy with graffiti to paint colorful, swirling messages . . . on buildings from Tunisia to Paris," as TED describes him.
eL Seed was born in 1981 in Paris. He chose his pseudonym at the age of sixteen while studying Pierre Corneille's 1638 play El Cid in a literature class. "Like Corneille's The Cid, eL Seed 'lives in service of art and hopes to foster peace, without prejudice for anyone he meets, driven only by art and by a message.'" His calligraphy quotes wise, uplifting messages from Arabic literature, but it can be appreciated fully simply for its form and flow, the way it occupies and beautifies space.
Here are some photos of his work (and you can find many more simply by googling).
Ajman, United Arab Emirates
Algiers, Algeria
Cape Town, South Africa
Paris
Miami, Florida: the mural quotes the third-century philosopher
Anathasius: "Anyone who wants to look at the sunlight
must wipe his eyes first."
"Lost Walls," Chott el-Jerid, Tunisia
At work on the Miami mural
Here is a TED talk that he gave in 2016, about a project covering fifty buildings in a poor Coptic Christian section of Cairo, where the main occupation is garbage collecting:
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