Quite a symbol. The gigantic Marianne painted by Shepard “Obey” Fairey on the side of a building at 13e arrondissement in 2016 was vandalized on the night of December 13 to 14. The national allegorical figure in street art version is now crying tears of blood-red paint, and the three words of the French motto, which span the entire width of the fresco, have been crossed out with jets of white paint. It is the militant platform Hiya !, dedicated to urban cultures, which revealed this hijacking at dawn on its website.
The young specialized media has, in parallel, received the claim of the authors, who remain anonymous, in the form of a pamphlet addressed to the government, from which it quotes a few passages: “So open your eyes (…) You steal the shiny words hidden behind the windows of our hopes and replace them with hollow signifiers, lustrous junk, encrusted with reactionary plastic emeralds (…) You are the violent husbands of the values you claim to defend (…) Wave your drones, zap between your cameras, the only thing you’ll see is our adults from the rooftops of the city, paint in our clothes. “
The attack detonates at 186, rue Nationale, at the corner of avenue Vincent-Auriol, which in recent years has become a monumental street art route, bringing together around twenty works by international muralist artists. This Marianne, the American Shepard Fairey, who became famous in 2008 for his campaign poster for Obama, had drawn her the day after the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. He had come to paint her in the Parisian public space in the wake of his participation in COP 21, in 2016. Then in 2017, Emmanuel Macron had acquired a version on canvas which followed him from his campaign HQ to his office at the Elysee.
This action, simply signed with a #mariannepleure, directly echoes a “Call for citizen and creative resistance” and an invitation “To build a new Concorde”, launched a few days earlier on the internet, already signed by around thirty musicians, graffiti artists and activists, and to whom Hiya! had joined.
“All these values (…) day after day unraveled”
This initiative denounces the fractures of French society, a “Regression inventory” and attacks on the main principles of the Republic in the midst of a wave of contestation of bills “Global security” and on separatism: “All these values of which we are so proud, freedom, equality, fraternity; but also secularism, the right to land, the right of asylum, are day after day unraveled. Understanding of the other disappears from social relationships. “
You have 28.64% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
–
