Artist eL Seed Creates 50-building Art Piece for Cairo’s Garbage Collectors

An anamorphic art piece by eL Seed covers 50 buildings with Arabic calligraphy in sunset shades on the Manshiyat Nasr neighborhood in Cairo, making the marginalized, garbage collecting community of the Zaraeeb one of the most viral artworks shared on Instagram last week. The project, Perception, revolves around a painted quote by Saint Athanasius, a Coptic Bishop of the 4th century, that reads, “Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly, needs to wipe his eyes first.”

The French-Tunisian artist eL Seed is known around the world for imbuing street art with messages of hope—what he calls “calligraffiti”—in every city he choses to paint in, from favelas in Rio de Janiero, Brazil to shanty towns in Cape Town. EL Seed hopes that this project in Cairo breaks misconceptions and “clears up the wrong ideas” people may have about the Zaraeeb or the Zabaleen, a people who are historically disenfranchised not only for being Coptic Christian in a majority Muslim country, but for the tedious task of collecting and sorting the city’s trash.