French artist Kesadi paints live mural at LSR College

Students gathered around a rising wall mural at the Lady Shri Ram College for Women this week as internationally acclaimed French street artist Olivier Poizat, who paints under the name Kesadi, transformed a surface into a live canvas, drawing curious students and art enthusiasts alike.

According to college officials, the project is being executed in collaboration with Alliance Francaise de Delhi, the Institut Francais en Inde, and the Embassy of France in India, giving students a rare chance to observe an international public art process up close and interact with the artist.

“Over the past few days, small groups of students have been stopping by between classes — some taking photographs, others asking questions — as Kesadi steadily builds the graffiti-inspired composition,” Kanika Ahuja, acting principal, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, said.

College officials said the initiative is meant to expose students to global artistic practices beyond the classroom.

“This mural brings into dialogue two seemingly distant figures, Sarojini Naidu and Annie Ernaux, through a shared commitment to voice, memory, and the everyday. The nightingale, long associated with Sarojini Naidu, is not used here as a decorative emblem but as a metaphor for poetic utterance, for a voice that transforms lived experience into language,” officials said.

They pointed out that rather than placing the bird in a romantic or natural landscape, it is positioned atop a modest grocery store facade. “The grocery store references the everyday spaces central to Annie Ernaux’s writing: supermarkets, small shops, domestic interiors, sites often overlooked in grand narratives, yet deeply embedded in memory and social identity. In Ernaux’s work, the ordinary becomes political; the personal becomes collective,” they said.

Ernaux is a French writer who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“By placing the nightingale above the grocery store, the mural proposes that poetry does not descend from distant, elevated spaces; it rises from the lived, the routine, and the unremarkable beauty around us.

“The bird does not dominate the structure; it emerges from it. The architecture of the everyday sustains the possibility of voice,” they added.

The mural forms part of celebrations, marking 2026 as the India-France Year of Innovation, officially launched earlier this year by the prime minister. The collaboration reflects the growing cultural partnership between the two countries, officials said.

The live artwork is expected to be completed on Tuesday and will be inaugurated on the same day.

For many students on campus, the process itself has already become the main attraction, as 15-20 students participated in the process, taking pictures and notes, officials added.