Nice Artist Transforms Beach Pebbles into Voice for Diversity After Terror Attack

A participatory artistic project to free speech. This is the whole meaning of "Draw a Mouth". Hicham Chikhi recounts how the idea came to him. "When we went back to the beach (at the level of the Boulevard Gambetta) with my children, we were looking at the pebbles while talking. I explained to my son that there were big ones, small ones, round or oval ones, and that they were all different. That they represented our society and that they all had a story through the journeys they made in the sea. It was when I got home that I had two ideas: to do a participatory project and to offer art outside of museums," he tells Nice matin.

The rest? A friend who had a surplus of pebbles in his company offered him the stones. The project was thus born. Hicham Chikh draws eyes on the pebbles and scatters them all over the beach and even in the city, sometimes abroad. "The idea is to ask those who find them to draw a mouth but also to tell their dream. As we grow up, we leave our dreams aside, out of fear or because we forget them. I want to open this door to society. That everyone questions the world in which we all live together despite our differences. The goal is to free speech. I am really attached to Nice and, with this project, I wanted to highlight it and pay tribute to it," he explains.

Many people who find the pebbles often send him messages or even photos. "Recently, I have been noting on the back of the pebble the Facebook and Instagram pages called ’Draw me a mouth’. Until now I was doing it completely anonymously. Some even tell me their dreams. One day, a school principal confessed to me that he had always dreamed of playing the saxophone. I met him a few months later and he told me that he had started taking lessons thanks to our meeting," says this art enthusiast.

In addition to "Draw a Mouth", Hicham Chikh has other projects. "Always on pebbles, I draw ’word flowers’. These are flowers whose stem is made with a word. I am in the process of looking for the names of people who are victims of an attack to write them on these flowers. My idea is that the person who finds the pebble offers it to the one who bears the name I have written on it. It is a project still in progress," he says, adding that he has also been contacted to appear in the memorial museum of terrorism that will open in Paris.