Large-scale street art that can only be seen from above reminds us that our urban centers can be full of magic, if we know where to look.
Giants may be fictional creatures, but that doesn’t mean they’re not real. In fact, on rooftops around the globe, gargantuan figures have been found napping, lounging, and lazing about, entirely hidden from our everyday goings-on at street level. Rather than fee-fi-fo-fum-ing their way across the countryside, these giants are content to stay right where their creators, French street artists Ella and Pitr, put them.
The slumbering giants are all part of Ella and Pitr’s “Sommeils Lourds” (“Heavy Sleep”) series. The purpose of the giants, explained the artists in an email to GOOD, is to “underline the chaos of our cities. We love seeing these giants sleeping in the middle of noise, cars, building, pollution… We are like small ants. When you walk on the drawing, you can't see it. It's abstract.”
What’s more, continue Ella and Pitr, because their art is only fully visible by airplane or drone photography, “[t]hanks to these images, people can have another point of view about their cities. It shows how small we are.”
Sommeils Lourds began in 2013 as part of a short film, in which a massive figure was painted in a snowey field. Since then, Ella and Pitr have gone on to create giants in France, Canada, Chile, and Italy.
This short, drone-shot video, helps put Sommeils Lourds into some kinetic perspective:
While lifetimes of fairy tales have trained us to fear and vilify giants, Ella and Pitr offer a different side to these humongous characters–one which helps put our cities, and our place within them, into a whole new perspective.
[via geyser of awesome, all images used with permission © Ella & Pitr]
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