Lek & Sowat│Mausoleum. Wild artistic residency

On August 12, 2010, Lek and Sowat found an abandoned supermarket in northern Paris, 40,000 m2 of blank walls spread over four floors. Huge and endless rooms where hundreds of people had lived before being driven out by the police overnight. For a year, in the greatest secrecy, the two artists went to this mystical place almost daily to paint and organize a wild artistic residence unique in its kind. They asked about forty French graffiti artists and photographers, from the first to the last generation of the movement, to accompany them there, for a day or a week. Together, they created a mausoleum, a temple dedicated to their underground culture on the verge of disappearing in the era of street art and its globalized pop aesthetic. This book aims to retrace the major visual stages of this extraordinary experience.