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Guided by wooden pegs, Saype painstakingly
builds up the final image of two hands clasping each other's
forearms in the windswept corner of an old cement factory and
surrounded by a sea of wooden and tin shacks.
In his "Beyond Walls" series, the 31-year-old graffiti artist
links street and land art in cities across the world -- often
depicting a close-up of two people's hands gripping each other's
forearms.
"The idea is to create the biggest human chain, to speak about
togetherness and today in Cape Town this is the ninth step of
that project," Saype, who was born Guillaume Legros, told
Reuters.
"For me it is very interesting to speak about togetherness here,
because I think it was a pillar of Mandela's dream," he said of
South Africa's first democratically elected president, Nelson
Mandela, who made his maiden public speech in Cape Town in 1990
after 27 years in prison for fighting apartheid.
Elected South Africa's first Black President in 1994, Mandela
tried to foster reconciliation between the white minority and
Black majority following years of racial discrimination.
Using a special eco-friendly mixture of chalk, charcoal and
water with a milk protein as the glue to allow the paint to
adhere to the ground, Saype has also spray-painted his
temporary, biodegradable images on lawns from Yamassoukro in
Ivory Coast to the Champ de Mars next to the Eiffel Tower in
Paris.
Last year, he painted a large evanescent fresco on the lawn of
the United Nations' European headquarters in Geneva to mark the
75th anniversary of its founding.
(Reporting by Wendell Roelf; Editing by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo
and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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