FACTUAL Inspired by the omnipresence of street art in the 13th borough where the daily’s headquarters are located, the World Festival offers a discovery tour of street art works and a performance by the artists Apôtre and Tcheko.
Who says 13th Parisian borough, says urban art. Since the 1980s, graffiti artists and other street artists have taken over the walls and wastelands of this rapidly changing district in the south of the capital. From the fridges to Tower 13, from the quays of the Seine to the forbidden catacombs, from the blue-white-red Marianne by Shepard Fairey on the national street to the giant fresco at C215, street of doctor Magnan, the borough has changed in artistic spot.
It was therefore only natural that Le Monde, also anchored in the 13th arrondissement, put urban art in the spotlight during its festival. Saturday, September 17, a course led by journalists from Afrik-jeunes Patrick Hlovor and others will take festival-goers from work to work in the borough. Sunday 18, we will wonder about “How and why preserve an ephemeral art? with Jean Faucheur, artist, curator and president of the Urban Art Federation, Nicolas Gzeley, graffiti artist, author and president of the National Center for Digital Archives of Urban Art (Arcanes), and Jérôme Coumet, Mayor of the 13th .
But art will also be lived live all weekend, in front of the newspaper. In partnership with the Urban Art Federation, the M.U.R XIII will invite two artists to create an ephemeral work on a huge wall of (white) newsprint, during the festival. This association offers throughout the year an open-air exhibition on the port of the station in the 13th, at the level of the Simone-de-Beauvoir footbridge.
For Afrik-jeunes, two artists will be on the wall. Apôtre, after twenty years of practice, moved away from conventional graffiti to write on the walls. The Parisian no longer inscribes his name there, but sentences, starting a dialogue, as physical as semantic, with the support.
The words become almost illegible and metamorphose into paint. Apôtre, thus develops a poetry, according to the mental wanderings that he paints on the city, reducing the border between writing and painting.
Tcheko’s work begins with pencil drawings from an early age, in the West Indies, and continues with graffiti on the walls of the 19thn borough in the 1980s. Having gone through character design in the video game industry and 3D character modeling, the jack-of-all-trades artist participates in several large-scale projects such as Lek & Sowat’s Mausoleum in 2010,
as well as the Direct Traces project by the same artists, which has been part of the Pompidou Center collections since 2014. The work La Cage Dorée, currently visible in the 13th Quai François-Mauriac for M.U.R XIII, is him.
Two artists who will have white card during the festival… on white beach.
