The eighth stage of the 'Beyond Walls' project crosses the Bosphorus Strait
For an artist who seeks to build cultural bridges with his works, to be able to take a project to istanbul and to develop it straddling the two continents, the European and the Asian, is to loop the loop of performance. This is precisely what has happened with the eighth stage of Beyond Walls, the French initiative Saype, that has been proposed paint the largest human chain in the world.
To Saype (a contraction of Say Peace, after which Guillaume Legros stands) it seemed especially symbolic to display his art in Istanbul, at the place where the western world and the eastern world meet, and somehow stage the union message from him.
The 'Beyond Walls' fresco at Bogazici University
To do this, at this stage, instead of one, Saype has painted three frescoes: one of 2,500 square meters in the European part of the city, specifically at Bogazici University; another in the beykoz neighborhood, which occupies 1,600 square meters in the Asian area of Istanbul; and a third that serves as a connecting thread between the previous two, using for this, as a canvas, a grassy barge plying the Bosphorus.
“The idea is to talk about coexistence and optimism because I believe that we are in a moment of humanity in which the world is polarizing and a part of the population chooses to close in on itself”, Saype explains in the press material.
And so, speaking of unity, kindness and opening up to the world, he has been since June 2019, when he began his Beyond Walls at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, and then jumped to Andorra, Geneva, Berlin, Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) , Yamoussoukro (Ivory Coast) and Turin.
Of course, now it will be useless to go to one of these cities to see Saype's works. They are ephemeral. His maxim is to cause an impact on society without impacting nature. That's why he uses a biodegradable paint created by himself based on charcoal, chalk, water and milk proteins. The content remains, but not the container.
Some 1,600 square meters of art in the Beykoz neighborhood