JABA

The Liège graffiti artist JABA created this 40-meter-high fresco in 2019, commissioned by the non-profit organization Une Ville En Couleur. The content of the mural was developed during workshops with residents of the social housing blocks, the primary school Klavertje Vier, and community organizations. You can find the artist's signature in the baobabs and the floating Senegalese buses. "A city without graffiti is a city without a soul," he says in a TedxTalk (YouTube, 2016).

Through his work, he aims to bring together neighborhood residents of different ages and create images based on their stories. Brussels guide Joris Sleebus, a co-initiator of this drawing, likes to draw a connection with the murals that appeared in the 1970s on houses that have since been demolished here in the Noordwijk. The paintings were a protest against the encroaching demolition of this working-class neighborhood to make way for the megalomaniac Manhattan project.

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