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 fucking 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