June 15, 2015 The famous Pont des Arts bridge used to be a common haunt of lovers, armed with padlocks, or lovelocks which were then locked on the bridge as a sign of enduring love for their partners. However, that has become a thing of the past with an announcement from authorities that the locks had to be taken off because the weight of the metals were becoming a threat to the bridge.
It’s not all doom and gloom though, removing the padlocks has given room for the works of a Franco-Tunisian graffiti street artist eL Seed to be displayed, after city authorities invited Mehdi Ben Cheikh, a curator to create a temporary exhibition of street art before the end of the year.
The work titled PINK LETTERS is a meter high, contains a quote from French novelist Honore de Balzac and spans the bridge over the River Seine.
Cheikh believes that eL Seed’s work represents the contemporary Arab world, and says “I thought it was brave, and brave to put an Arabic sentence up in Paris. It’s not only a language of terrorists, it’s the language of a whole people across the world. A people who are very open with an extremely spiritual dimension, in their religion too,”
While some tourists expressed their disappointment in not able to place their locks, as after all Paris is a city of love, U.S. tourist Max Dulberger, appreciated the clash of cultures of the works and said “It’s a cool combination to bring together difference types of art, with the classical stuff and more modern nitty gritty stuff, so that’s kind of a cool combination,”