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I kind of got to the art world by accident in a way
When I started writing my name on the street, like I'm here
And when I moved from the suburb to Paris I met some real
writers that actually got style. I took photos of them and I started
printing them on cheap photocopy paper. I was 17 and I could paste
my photo on the Champs-Élysées; I could paste my photo in the center
of Paris, and I started framing them,
like a piece of blood around it
It was just like I would let the paint drip all over and writing
"sidewalk gallery." To really mark this as an art installation
One day my friend who live in another suburb told me, "Hey, why don't you
come and paste in mine." And I go there, it's a really rough neighborhood,
I start pasting some of my photos, and the guys they say, "Why don't
you take us?" So I start taking wide frame, that photo with the guy
holding the camera like a weapon. We were like, "What do we do with
those photos?" And that's the moment we find out the way to enlarge really big
We did it illegally in the suburbs, what happened is that a year later
the riots started in front of those photos. I talked to all my friends
I knew there and they were like, "How crazy is that? People think
we're all like *** rioters." I was like, "You know what,
if you're not one then I have this 28mm lens, it's a short lens,
and I'm gonna take a portrait of you really close, and I'm gonna put your name,
your age, your building number, so someone could even come to
your door and knock there. And I'm gonna paste it in Paris
this time." And that's how I started this 28mm project, from that
trust of like, I go there and I do it with people
So I was like, "How is it elsewhere? How is it in other places
where I keep hearing about it every day?" In the Middle East, you know, that's
the case, we've talked about it like if we're from there. So I decided
to go there with just one friend and we decided to photograph
doing the same job on both sides
Two taxi driver, two teacher, two hairdresser
Then the people who come in the street start arguing with you and saying,
"Hey, what are you doing? What is that? Is this political?" "No, it's an art project"
"Well, what's your art project?" "Oh, I photograph two people
doing the same job, one from here and one from the other side"
And there will always be that silence where people look at the photo
and don't know who is who. Don't know who is the taxi driver
from Palestine and who is the taxi driver from Israel
From the beginning, it really impressed on me how people dedicate their time
and energy and life into it. And I was just the enabler in a way
Seeing how the community would always involve themselves
with the project, I was like, "Why don't they do it themselves,
without me?" And that new thing was like, okay, I'm going to reverse
the process. I want you to take the photos and I'm gonna print it,
and I'll send it back to you wherever you are in the world and for free
if you can't afford it. But you have to paste it. It went from a local project
with a global impact to a local project with a local impact that speaks
to the community. And that is because I go out of the equation, because
it's done by locals to locals. And suddenly the project went
in places I could have never been to. In Tunisia they did one of the
craziest actions: they replaced all the portraits of the dictator Ben Ali
by their own photos. They've never seen other faces than the one
of the dictator and suddenly there is others, they've never seen
art of the street there. People were confused, so they start scratching
them down and the people were like, "No, we did it ourselves, no one
helped us." And then one old guy came and said, "Hey guys, you have the
right to paste. They have the right to
scratch it down. This is democracy. It's the first time ever we have the
right to touch our wall, so you should see that as a success"
Next year it's going to be indoor museum installation, but I really
leave to the street what should be done in the street. Because it's
not that it's only the biggest gallery that exists, but it's also a space
that you cannot reproduce in the inside. Because it touch people that
will never step inside