Women in Paris Street Art
Photography by and copyright © Zoe Marie Bel, 2024. All rights reserved.
Want to know why Paris will never be an insane asylum? Good luck keeping its walls white, suckers.
Like Berlin – that other European capital whose artists have far easier access to aerosol cans and jerry-rigged scaffolding than to home-ownership – Paris is a city whose present mood is right there on its face, no filters. At least, if by "face" we mean its walls, lampposts, walk lights, sidewalks, freeway overpasses, defaced billboards... you name it. Spray-painted, wheat-pasted, fever-stickered or just Sharpied and mad as hell. Street art. (Okay, some would call it graffiti. And illegal. And an affront to the history and culture of the city. But that's a debate for another time.)
As she wrote 'Valérie', Zoe Marie Bel noticed this about Paris street art: it's an area in which women are energetically represented. (That's in complete contrast to female representation on the historical buildings of Paris: see Céleste at the Palais Garnier.) This female representation in street art is, of course, not going to please everyone. In fact, it's not always going to please feminists and minorities (for example, where are all the flat-chested ladies at? The frumps? Or how about the black mathematicians?) But it's disruptive, insistent - and at least some of it is created by women.
Included here are some of the author's favorite pieces of female-centered street art in Paris, which she captured in years 2020 - 2023. The reality of street art, as Céleste acknowledges in the novella, is that the chances are none of these pieces are still there.
- "What changed things was a high-school trip to Paris, a stones-and-bones tour of the capital. The part I remember was the Palais Garnier, the opera house in the 9th arrondissement. There were bronze busts of composers mounted high on the building, and I noticed that every single one of them was male. The only sculptures of women were generic nymphs with their tits out. My teacher said this was because there weren't any female architects back then. So men put their own faces on buildings, and women who wanted to see their own faces were told to go look in the mirror."
- – Part Three, 'Bagnolet'; Chapter 1