2023-05-01 09:00:21
“We live to walk on the heads of kings. » Thursday, February 16, at the head of the demonstration against the pension reform, the black blocks deploy a banner in black and white. Ten meters wide. The quote fromHenri IV, by Shakespeare, frames the drawing of a crouching and hooded man, halfway between post-medieval imagery and hip-hop iconography. Someone then puts forward the idea of moving the banner in the middle of the procession, “to see”. Immediately the whole “block”, more than a thousand people, spontaneously took their place behind her. This is where they truly see the strength of the symbol: the banner as a banner, art as a rallying point.
« Ils »it’s Black Lines, a group which, since 2018, has brought together more than three hundred artists and graffiti artists to produce large political frescoes that can be summed up in a few words: social justice, climate justice and anti-racism, and which now produces most of the banners of the black blocks. “Let one take care, the others will follow”, “Our revolt cannot be dissolved”, “Who sows hess [la misère] harvest the zbeul [le bordel] »accompanied by drawings where the autonomous and the forces of order clash, where militants pose under their hoods and groups of hyenas. “A classic image, it is the animals fighting against the royal lion”deciphers one of the authors.
They are about fifteen, heterogeneous assembly of 18 to 60 years, to compose these large tarpaulins. There is Veneno, a young dark-haired woman who has returned from three years in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she learned the art of printmaking. His series of hooded couples kissing under shrapnel reminds us that there are dreams of tomorrows and of the beach under the cobblestones. It was she who pushed to move from the fresco to the banner. There is Vinci, with a militant culture, who was already making banners for the Justice for Adama movement. And then two Chilean brothers brought the tradition of muralism that tells a story.
Finally, of course, there is Itvan – and Lasc, his lifelong partner – who, under the pseudonym of Arone, graffiti as a teenager on the blind walls of Paris. Fine features, shy timbre, gentle gaze, Itvan Kebadian is 37 years old. Passed by the Beaux-Arts of Bourges and Nantes, the graffiti artist is today a recognized artist, with a gallery owner, Dominique Fiat, who has a storefront behind the Picasso Museum in Paris. But it all started with him.
“Symbolic Report”
We are in 2018. That year, the director of Armenian origin Jacques Kebadian takes Itvan and his half-brothers to Yerevan for the first time. During their stay, the population rose up. The army does not shoot because, enthuses the young man, April 24 is the anniversary of the genocide. “At that moment, I understood that it is not the balance of power but the symbolic relationship that makes revolutions. » In France, we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of May 68.
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