From the Series
Four hours, 100 scholars and one wall of 140 metres in Cape Town was turned into a work of art recently!
Lorenzo Nassimbeni was commissioned to design a mural for the retaining wall of Sea Point Primary School in Cape Town.
The project came to be a community effort with Nassimbeni working with the Interact Clubs (community service initiatives) of three high schools in the vicinity to realise the mural.
Nassimbeni made sure to design the mural in a way that would ensure the implementation was relatively simple. As such, the design was composed of a single building block forming the basis of an ordered pattern.
This building block was physically translated into a series of identical cardboard templates, which were used by the scholars to stencil the design onto the wall. The stencilling was done by following a layout drawing provided by Nassimbeni, outlining the geometry and colour code of the mural.
The next step involved pre-painting the wall in a calming blue, followed by white and yellow. The yellow, Nassimbeni explains, references Cape Town’s selection as World Design Capital 2014.
Nassimbeni further explains that the concept of the mural design is as simple as the layout. From the one side the building blocks used to compose the formation on the wall resemble a series of scholars holding hands. “The idea here is to communicate that, besides the bricks and mortar of buildings, cities are made up of the people who inhabit these buildings, and the space formed between them,” Nassimbeni says.
Further along the mural, the patterns simplifies into house-like shapes, referencing the residential aspect of the area. Towards the end of the mural the house-like shapes become less and less, until only the base blue colour of the mural remains, referring to both the blue sea and sky of Sea Point.
