eL Seed Quotes
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You meet a lot of people in Dubai coming from a lot of different places. Even me, I'm always in transit. I don't stay anywhere too long. I like the energy that I found when I came here the first time. I start knowing people, and people start knowing me as well.
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I couldn't know about my culture, my history, without learning the language, so I started learning Arabic - reading, writing. I used to speak Arabic before that, but Tunisian Arabic dialect. Step by step, I discovered calligraphy. I painted before and I just brought the calligraphy into my artwork. That's how everything started. The funny thing is the fact that going back to my roots made me feel French.
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I'm more into the perception scope of a work; I'm exploring this concept of perception and how people can look at someone, look at the community, and put in so much judgment, so much stereotype, so much misconception.
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It was an identity crisis. I was born and raised in France, but I never really felt French, so I needed to find something that I was more connected to. I used to go back to Tunisia every summer, but I was more into the language, my Arabic roots.
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Sometimes the reading is related to something I do, sometimes it's not. I feel like every time I read something, there's a quote or something that comes into the work later. There's nothing that happens by coincidence. It's fate, I would say.
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In France, they make you feel that you cannot be two things at the same time. You can't be French and Arabic; you can't be French and Muslim.
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When actually, you have one identity made of different parts. Depending on where you are, at what time in your life, some things are higher or deeper. That's what I understood later: that I'm French and Tunisian, and I'm accepting the French part of my identity.
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Art brings people back to their sensibility as human beings. This is the purpose of art: To bring people together and bring back the humanity as well.
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I've seen it personally that people have a natural sensibility to Arabic script. I don't know it if it's because of the shape, I don't know what it is in this script that makes it so universal. But even if you don't understand it, you still have this feeling; you can feel the piece of art in front of you.
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"eL Seed" was inspired by the French play Le Cid by Pierre Corneille. It was seeing "Le Cid" coming from the Arabic name "el sayed," which means "the master, the man." So I called myself like that because I was 16; I said, "Yes, I'm the man." That's how it started.
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I'm trying to create artwork that makes people, and myself, think about judgment as a reflex. This is something that must be changed.
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I've been working a lot with identity and roots, being part of your roots. I went into this topic where I was trying to break the stereotype of Arabic language. The non-translation work, this is where I make the switch, where you don't need to translate.
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Everywhere I've been, from South Africa to Brazil, people are connected to it. For me, art is a way to bring people together. You can put people on the same level, the perception is the same. You can bring a worker, like a cleaning guy, or the richest guy on earth, and they will have the same feeling or they would be able to feel the same.