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A Spanish Artist Subverted the Scars of a Refugee Camp [Exclusive Photos]

Spanish artist Pejac turns chipped paint into beautiful images in Jordan.
All images ©Pejac, used with permission

Best-known for making murals that blend into a city's features, Spanish street artist Pejac takes his efforts to the next level by literally carving his latest series of images into the walls a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. The paint on the walls of the Al-Hussein camp in Amman is often chipped, but rather than covering these scars, Pejac turns their chippedness into art. He recently inscribed meticulous renditions of a boy flying a kite, a man facing down a mechanized digger, a family of migrants crossing the chipped wall like a mountain, and a map view of the land of Palestine into the existing grey areas, reclaiming the meaning of chipped paint from something discarded into something beautiful.

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"With these four small interventions, I am trying to tell a minimalistic story about the Palestinian refugees in Al-Hussein," Pejac tells The Creators Project. "By removing small areas of the 'skin' of the houses, I want to transform the paint chipping, produced by the passage of time, into evocative landscapes and transmit the pride of its inhabitants through the walls."

The Al-Hussein refugee camp dates back to 1948, during the Arab-Israeli War. Pejac's interventions often come loaded with idealogical messages, as in the case of his environmentally-concious Heavy Sea project, depicting an ocean of discarded tires in an undisclosed location. This new project is an implicit advocacy for humane treatment of refugees, and an attempt to offer dignity in their surroundings with the tools at his disposal. Check out the artworks, entitled Kite, Migration, Palestine, and Throne, below.

Learn more about Pejac on his website, and see more of his work on Instagram.

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