This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on January 14, 2025. Listen to the podcast here.
Jon Alterman: You grew up outside of Paris speaking Tunisian Arabic, but not reading or writing it, and it's my understanding that you started tagging things in graffiti without any reference to Arabic. How did Arabic work its way into your graffiti?
eL Seed: Before I picked the name “eL Seed”—my real name is Faouzi, “F-A-O-U-Z-I," and the “I,” instead of putting a dot, I used to put a hamza. I found that if you tag like that people are always like, "Wow. That's fun." I wanted to learn calligraphy. I discovered calligraphy when I was taking a class of Arabic, classical Arabic, about how to read and write in early 2000.
Jon Alterman: And you were about 18 or so at the time?
eL Seed: I started at 18, but the first time I saw somebody doing calligraphy, it was in 2004, and I was mesmerized, I thought, "This is amazing. I would love to know how to do this." And so, I asked the guy, "Do you give any classes?" He said, "I wanted to, but nobody's interested." I was like, "Oh." I'd love to find a way to find this guy again. It was about 20 years ago, and he was an Algerian guy. And then, I was looking at calligraphy, the traditional one, without knowing there were rules and stuff.
I started drawing, tracing letters and stuff, but without knowing everything was so conditioned and put in a box. And honestly, this happened through a friend of mine, a French artist. I met him in 2007 in Montreal, and he was a graffiti artist writing his name “Est One”—“E-S-T." He was modifying his letters, so putting two dots on the “E”, extending the bar of the “T.” And I was like, "Wow, this is insane. That's so beautiful, I wish I could do something like that."
He said, "Yeah, Faouzi, let's come back. You know, like come paint with me." And at this time, I was really into a corporate job, and so I had stopped painting. He's the one who put me back into painting, into graffiti.
I'm not interested in just doing, I don’t want to say, “Western graffiti,” but graffiti as we know it, and just writing “el-Seed”—“El S-E-E-D." And actually, back in the day, I used to write it “E-L-S-C-I-D.” Honestly, the first time I did graffiti in Arabic, or calligraphy, I felt like Spiderman.
You know when he wakes up during the night, the spider bites him, and then he wakes up and he has this superpower, that was me. It's so weird, honestly. It became so natural. And I really felt it. It was not difficult.
Jon Alterman: And then a relatively short number of years after, right after the Tunisian Revolution in 2011, you started doing really big projects.
How did you conceptualize the idea of doing large-scale public art in Tunisia and this new style that you were still in the process of developing? It doesn't seem like an obvious continuation of what you had been doing before.
eL Seed: I was always amazed by artists who could paint a large-scale art piece. I started with small pieces, like a small word that you can just write by reaching for the ladder. Over time, I went bigger and bigger. After the revolution in Tunisia, I didn't want to do anything right after because for me, it was too opportunistic to say, "Hey, look, I'm an artist, I'm painting something." I waited at least a year before coming back. Literally a year, 365 days. I remember I came back to Tunisia and started a project on December 17, 2011, whereas Bouazizi self-immolated on December 17, 2010.
I remember my first real large piece. It was seven by forty meters. I did it in Kairouan, and what I enjoyed was not the actual big scale of the art piece. For me, the most enjoyable thing was the interaction and reaction of the people in the street. I was painting for 10 days with random people who approached me about what I had started painting. The first day, six people approached me, and the six people would spend 10 days with me every day from 7:00 to maybe 10:00 PM at night, it was crazy, and it was beautiful. And actually, one of them still works with me today after 13 years, which is insane.
Jon Alterman: You've done a lot of community-related art. How do you choose communities to do public art in? How do you engage communities when you're doing public art? And has that changed as you've done this more and more? You described doing this for the first time, and a lot of it was happenstance. Now you do it a lot.
eL Seed: When you involve a community, they become the guardian of your artwork in a certain way. Sometimes I'm just attracted by the look of a place, and I think, "I would love to create something there." Just an artwork with this in the background. But, for example, in Nepal and in Cairo's garbage collector neighborhood, I wanted the work to become the amplifier of the voice of the people. And so, it's important to me for them to feel they own the artwork.
And when I say “own”, it's not necessarily just about being involved in the painting process. For example, in Egypt, I had like 10 members of the community who helped me that I paid. They were working with me for a month, but I'm also talking about the people on your lift, somebody who opens the window of his house and offers you a cup of tea or some bread. Shops indirectly participate as well. Sometimes we go eat at lunch and are told, "No, no, today's on me." That's participation in the creation process because they’re encouraging my team and I to continue finishing what we're doing, that's what involving communities means to me. It’s not only asking people to come take a brush. Overall, it builds a collective effort around creating the artwork.
Jon Alterman: Has that become easier or harder as you've become better known around the world?
eL Seed: In the communities where I go, people do not know me, so that's the funny part. It's always a task of convincing people to take part, and it depends on how you approach it. I always say that in every place that I go, there's a “key”, and the key is like a character, a person that I meet, that ends up being the one to convince everybody. In Egypt, he was a guy called Mario. He was a friend. In Nepal, it was somebody called Muhan. In Tunisia, it was somebody else, like in different places I've been. So, it's always someone that comes and says, "Look, I think we should just take the time to listen to this guy and maybe see what he wants to do." Every key that I've met, most of them, 99 percent of the people, I'm still in touch with them today.
Jon Alterman: Does the planning and the meeting the key individual start long before you start the work? Or is it sort of organic? You go someplace, you meet some people, and the work is planned, it starts, and gets executed in relatively short order?
eL Seed: No, it takes some time. Egypt took a year to plan. Nepal—it took me six months to plan. When I did this project in a refugee camp in south Lebanon, it was through somebody who introduced me to a community of Palestinian embroiders—women who do Palestinian embroidery. It was a real process of getting to know the people, speaking on Zoom. When I did this project in Philadelphia a few years ago, I had a meeting online with 20 people. At first, I just spent a week having tea and coffee in everybody's house.
They wanted to understand why I, coming from the other side of the world, was going to paint Arabic calligraphy in West Philadelphia. I was telling them, "It's not about the Arabic calligraphy, it's about the text that I'm using, and the bridge that I'm creating." Because in Philadelphia I was using a quote from W.E.B. Du Bois, who was the first sociologist to write a social study about the Afro-American community of Philadelphia.
I told them, "Look, I'm connecting you to him." It was important for me to say, to the younger generation, "We all should know about this guy who wrote this." It was all about connecting, bridging cultures together and then the calligraphy is just a pretext. The art piece is just a pretext. It's a tool, actually, to bridge culture and people together.
Jon Alterman: Let me first ask about the text, and then I want to ask about the bridge piece. Your work has sometimes been connected to the Hurufiyya movement, which arose in Arabic art and tried to use letters—not to be read literally but instead be inspired by the shapes of letters. In fact, a lot of your art doesn't have discreet letters at all, it's not intended to be read. But on the other hand, not all of your art—but certainly the art I'm familiar with—has texts that are very clearly related to the place you're doing the work.
How should we think about the connection between the words that you ascribe to a piece of art and the shapes that the artwork itself takes? Because as I say, there aren't words themselves in the artwork.
eL Seed: People sometimes associate me with Hurufiyya when I'm actually outside the confines of Hurufiyya, because the Hurufiyya movement is people just painting with letters and not writing something. Me, I write by drawing. Even the practice of writing, it's already a way of drawing. That's how I see it.
If a “C” was pronounced “woah,” we would see it differently. We associate a sound to a shape, which in turn makes letters and words. I draw a sign that makes a sound, which associated with other signs becomes a word, and then matched with other words becomes a phrase, and those phrases are always related to the place where I am.
There's a lot of documentation before I even start an artwork because it's important for me to connect the community with the artwork and the artwork with the community, and that's how I treat the community, that way it becomes the guardian of the artwork.
Jon Alterman: And as you think about the work you do, you started off doing principally work in the Arab world, but now you've done work on the Korean DMZ, and I have artwork in my home that's derived from some of that work.
You've done work in North America, you said Philadelphia—in Africa, in Asia. Do you see what you're doing as an Arab contribution to world art? Do you see your work transcending “Arab-ness” in some way and becoming universal?
eL Seed: What is interesting is that my work is more out of the Arab world than in the Arab world, statistically. If I count the amount of work that I've painted, or artworks, sculptures, or canvases I’ve done, my work is more out of the Arab world than in the Arab world. But Arabic script has a universal beauty that you don't need to translate.
The organic shape of the letters reaches your soul before it touches your eyes, and that's why it's just a means, it's just a tool, a medium. I'm not here to claim Arab identity. I'm here to say the same way you have English writing in India or Subway in South Korea—how could it bother anybody to have something in Arabic in America or in South America or in Europe. For me, this is about highlighting this connection that we have as humans. Like, I’m doing this, so maybe you would be interested in what I’m doing, maybe you're going to start questioning, "Why? What is this?"
Once, like two years ago in Paris, I was part of a show in the city here, and somebody from the municipality came up to me. He saw me painting the first week, and after the weekend he came up to me and said, “I saw those diamonds that you were painting." He was talking about the nuqta, the dots on the letters. He said, "I love those diamonds." And "I saw the same diamonds,” he told me, “when I was watching Tomb Raider on TV. I saw the same diamond in one of her books." I told him, "That's not diamond. What you see as diamonds are actually dots. They're part of letters, and this is Arabic."
And then he was like, "Oh, wow." Then I told him the meaning of what I was writing, and he was amazed. But the beauty of this was to show that, actually, there's no translations needed. The same way that when you listen to music, sometimes you listen to music from a foreign language. You don't understand it, but you love the melody. And you start singing it, but you have no idea what the person is saying, but you love it because it touches your soul, and this is the same effect with calligraphy.
Jon Alterman: Do you see yourself as playing the same role as world music? That's an interesting metaphor I hadn't thought about, but is that the most appropriate metaphor, do you think for the kind of art you're creating?
eL Seed: Definitely. I think this is. It's a kind of visual music.
Jon Alterman: But it's interesting because, as we've discussed, your art has a very clear message that's very connected to the communities in which it's often based, which is not the way we think about music. Music, we often think about sort of universal themes, and you tend to write in particularistic ways connecting to communities.
eL Seed: What you said is right, but there's one part you missed. I write messages that are relevant to a place, but that have a universal dimension, so everybody can relate to it. The phrase that I put in the Cairo garbage collector neighborhood says, "Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first." This community is Coptic. The guy whose quote that I just mentioned is a Coptic bishop who was from Egypt and lived in the fourth century. So, I take somebody from Egypt, from the Coptic culture, because I'm inside a Coptic neighborhood, that way for me, it's easier to convince them to take part.
But this quote, written by a guy in the first century, speaks about perception. If I did a perception quote in Peru, I would like somebody who spoke about perception in Peru. As for the quote in the Coptic community, if I tell you anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly will need to wipe his eyes first, it means if you want to see the real image of somebody, sometimes just remove the stereotype—the dirt, the wrong image. That way you can see the person at the right angle. And that's exactly what I meant. And we all have, from China to the United States, everybody has judged somebody without knowing them or has been judged by somebody without being known by them. And that was the point of it.
In Nepal, I wanted to talk about the resilience of women, and the inspiration of how Nepali women rebuilt their homes after the earthquake of 2015. They created these workshops where they build earthquake-resistant bricks, they work like a Lego, so you pile them like Legos. I wanted to use this example of this woman in Nepal to speak about women. I don't like to use this word, but I used this quote from this woman who was one of the first feminists in Nepal’s history, a contemporary feminist. She passed away in 1941.
In one of her poems, she said, "The tears in my eyes are the same as yours." But it was more profound, I forgot the first part of the poem. The idea was that there was no difference between the feelings you can feel and those I can feel. When the tears come, this is our humanity that is connected. We're not the same gender, but we're together in the same fight. Anybody from France or Russia or South Africa recognizes themselves in this.
Jon Alterman: It feels to me like much of your art came out of a revolutionary moment in the Arab world, at least your spread in the Arab world came at a revolutionary moment, a moment of profound change. How did you see other new forms of art arising—street art, graffiti, throughout the Arab world? Did you feel connected to a broader set of social changes that were going on, whereas somebody who grew up in France was always a little bit removed from your personal experience?
eL Seed: My journey was one of identity. Growing up with my friends, connected to my Tunisian roots, not truly knowing who I was, where I wanted to go, and having this strong need to belong. My Arab identity was something that I was really proud of. Around 16 or 17 years old, I started claiming it, that's why I started learning how to read and write Arabic.
It started like that and slowly developed further. I realized that your identity is not only one layer, it's different layers that get expressed in different ways, depending on where you are and what phase of your life you’re in.
I was seeing the rise of Arab art, not as something new because some people say graffiti in the Arab world started in 2011 when you saw people in Palestine painting on walls. There was even a book by this Swedish journalist called Gaza Graffiti that spoke about wars in Palestine in the 1960s or 1970s—at the same time as the rise of graffiti in the United States. For me, it was just about being a part of a movement and continuing something that had started before me. The way I was doing it was different than what people had seen before because my approach was really coming from an identity crisis. My expression was different and totally singular. Other people express themselves in different ways. We're not coming from the same circumstances, so that's why there's not one type of Arab art but various forms.
Jon Alterman: It feels like in many ways, the political moment of the Arab world has moved on, yet you've remained, it seems to me, very involved in issues of social change, issues of community. How do you see social change evolving in the Middle East and the Arab world as an artist who thinks about communities and the way communities work, and art’s role in communities? What's art's role in social change, and the social change that's going on now?
eL Seed: The issue at hand in the Western world, in the Arab world, and everywhere around the world, is that art piques our emotion. And we live in a world where we want to quantify everything, and we don't have the capacity of quantifying or measuring the success of an art piece or its impact. How do you measure pride. How do you measure love and courage? How do you measure happiness? That is impossible. And people, they forget that.
Imagine you create an art piece for a neighborhood which leads people to feel prouder. What impact does this have? You cannot measure it, but you just know that people are like, "Hey, we feel so proud of this." Sometimes, people don't see that. Some things have less value to people when value doesn't align with the monetary or financial worth. Art is something intangible that you cannot grasp, and that's how I see it on my side as an artist.
Jon Alterman: How do you see your art evolving now? Where do you want your art to be in another 10 years?
eL Seed: I don't want to control that. I'd love to be influenced and inspired by things that I'm not even expecting. Sometimes you meet people, and you speak with them, and they just inspire you in a way that you wouldn't expect. I love that, and I just want to follow the flow. I have so many projects that I want to do, and I hope I will be able to make them and then, hopefully, they will inspire other people as well.
Jon Alterman: eL Seed, thank you so much for joining us on Babel.
eL Seed: No, thank you, Jon. Thank you so much.
(END.)