World-renowned interdisciplinary artist Faith XLVII from South Africa recently traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to lend her soft sense of natural realism to the recovering city’s fragile landscape. As part of the Underline project facilitated by street art collective Persona, Faith painted a series of medicinal plants native to Lebanon on dilapidated spaces ranging from abandoned interiors to crumbling walls. Her work glows amongst the natural public art ecosystem reacting to this place’s tumultuous history and resilient spirit. Organized by Art of Change in Collaboration with Street Art United States.
“Faith’s new series, ‘Medicinal Flowers of Lebanon’ leads us along brittle sites of Beirut, tracing past and present scars etched into the city,” a press release for the project explains. “Each flower contains properties known to contain healing properties and as they grow out of the concrete they urge us in a sense, towards healing.” Rose hips bloom alongside chicory and Horned Poppy, all plants that thrive amongst the city’s scenery. Each one flowers according to Faith’s undeniable, delicate style, adapting to its surroundings in perfect spatial synergy.
I am thinking about this project while I write from Memphis, Tennessee, the weekend of this musically famous city’s annual mural festival. It’s my first time here on the border of Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, straddling the famous eponymous river, but I’ve traveled the American South extensively on two independent road trips from NYC to the Gulf Coast, each separated by eight years. The more recent expedition took place last Spring, and I had the pleasure of stopping in nine different cities to see galleries and meet art organizers.
Alabama has often enamored me, though the place’s confederate legacy feels inescapable. It’s the land that gets me—the roar of insects beyond the car window on wild back roads teeming with life, the burst of a magnolia tree under what Creedence Clearwater Revival called “southern rain.” Up in New York months prior, another world away yet still with its own rife legacy, a friend and I gazed up the Hudson River at the George Washington Bridge, grand in the distance. We discussed the fallibility of naming monuments after people in power at any point. I decided to dream about a society that names bridges and buildings after flowers.
From Alabama to New York City to Beirut, Lebanon, the earth itself feels somewhat divorced, blameless even, from the atrocities human beings enact upon it. Faith’s decision to scatter a trail of gorgeous, pertinent petals promotes healing in a place that badly deserves it, like everywhere else. Street art feels like a liminal space between civilization and nature—an organic phenomenon somewhere in between.
Made possible with extra assistance from Art of Change and special thanks to Nisrine Machaka-Houri “for her encouragement and research work,” Faith’s ‘Medicinal Flowers of Lebanon’ contributes to the Underline Project’s mission to heal cultural divides between Mediterranean countries that have been worsened by political moves over the past decades. The project’s site explains that Underline “promotes an idea of a cross-border artistic community based on the dissemination of Human Rights through different actions,” namely public art installations.
Nature, and flowers in particular, offer universal archetypes accessible to every living thing on the planet. Like street art, they’re a sign that something is living, breathing, and thriving—even in spite of history’s ever-progressing cacophony.
Faith XLVII: website | instagram
Persona: website | instagram
Art of Change: website | instagram
