From Football Ultras to Refugee Camps: How Seb Toussaint Uses One Word to Give Communities a Voice
What if the most important part of creating a mural wasn't deciding what you wanted to say — but asking someone else what they wanted the world to hear?
For more than a decade, French-British artist Seb Toussaint has traveled through refugee camps, informal settlements and underserved neighborhoods asking residents a deceptively simple question:
What word would you like to share with the world?
Love. Freedom. Peace. Future. Resilience. Family. Hope.
The answer becomes the mural.
Through his ongoing Share The Word Project, Toussaint has now painted 256 murals, each centered around a word selected by someone from the community where he is working. The project began in Jakarta in 2013 and has since traveled through communities across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.
But his path to becoming an internationally recognized muralist started somewhere very different.
It started in a football stadium.
Before the Murals, There Were Football Ultras
Toussaint grew up in Caen, Normandy, immersed in football supporter culture.
As a teenager, he became involved with Malherbe Normandy Kop, supporters of Stade Malherbe Caen. Instead of attending art school, Toussaint describes the ultra scene as part of his artistic education: designing banners, flags and enormous choreographed stadium displays known as tifos.
The scale was already monumental. Thousands of people. Huge letters.
High-contrast colors.
A message designed to be understood instantly.
Years later, many of those same principles would appear in his murals.
Toussaint himself has traced his development as an artist back to the countless hours spent creating banners and stadium displays on empty terraces in Caen.
And there was another lesson football gave him: a universal language.
You may arrive somewhere without speaking the local language or understanding every cultural reference, but mention a club, a player or a match and suddenly there is common ground.
That ability to connect across boundaries would become central to his life.
Then He Started Traveling
In 2011 and 2012, Toussaint traveled around the world by bicycle with childhood friends.
The experience exposed him to places far removed from the traditional art circuit — neighborhoods and communities that rarely appear in museums, magazines or international conversations.
Out of those travels came the idea for Share The Word.
The concept was deliberately simple. Toussaint enters a community and spends time there rather than treating the neighborhood as a temporary canvas. He approaches residents and asks them to choose a word meaningful to them.
Then he paints it on their home. There is no imported slogan. No predetermined social message.
No artist arriving to tell a community what it should represent.
The person who lives there chooses the word.
Toussaint creates the visual language around it.
The Artist Isn't the Author of the Message
That distinction is what makes Share The Word particularly interesting. Public art often speaks to communities.
Seb's project attempts to speak from within them.
A resident might choose peace. Another chooses life. Someone else chooses freedom, family, ambition or the name of the place they consider home.
Toussaint then builds an improvised mural around that word, adapting his colors, patterns and typography to the architecture and surroundings. His official project description emphasizes that these murals are generally created freestyle rather than imposed from a rigid predetermined composition.
The finished artwork becomes visually compelling.
But the word remains the center of the story.
And when the image travels through photography, social media, exhibitions and journalism, the resident's message travels with it. That is the larger mission by using art to direct attention toward people and places the outside world frequently overlooks.
256 Walls, and 256 Different Stories
The geographic range of Share The Word is extraordinary.
The project has reached communities in places including Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Brazil, India, Iraq, Uganda, Palestine, Venezuela, Mauritania, El Salvador, Thailand and Zambia, among others.
In the Kawergosk refugee camp in Iraq, residents chose words including Future, Freedom, Peace, Hope, Life and Ambition.
At Balata refugee camp in Palestine, words included Life, Happiness, Cooperation and Creativity.
In Caracas, residents selected words including Resilience, Freedom, Union, Friendship and
Memory.
And in Seb's most recent Share The Word chapter in Bauleni, Lusaka, Zambia, residents chose words including Mercy, Blessing, Wisdom, Legacy, Love and a word meaning “the place you call home.”
The murals may be colorful, but the real artwork is arguably the accumulated portrait of humanity created by those words.
Different religions.
Different languages.
Different political realities.
Different continents.
Yet certain ideas appear again and again.
Love. Peace. Home. Dignity. Freedom. Hope.
“Don't Be Too Careful”
During our conversation with Seb for the Global Muralism Podcast, one piece of advice emerged that feels connected to his entire journey:
Don't be too careful.
It is good advice for artists.
Possibly better advice for life.
Carefulness can protect us from failure, but it can also protect us from experience.
Toussaint's career was not built through a conventional institutional path. There was no traditional art-school-to-gallery trajectory.
There were football terraces.
A bicycle.
Travel.
Graffiti.
Strangers.
Neighborhoods far from the international art market.
And an idea simple enough to explain in one sentence.
Ask someone for a word.
Then paint it.
Can Art Actually Change a Community?
This is one of the questions we explored with Seb. It is tempting to exaggerate the power of public art. A mural cannot solve poverty. A painting cannot replace infrastructure. Color alone cannot repair political or economic inequality. But art can do something else extraordinarily well:
It can make us look.
A wall becomes an image.
The image becomes a story.
The story gets photographed, shared, published and discussed.
And suddenly someone thousands of miles away knows something about a neighborhood, and perhaps a person, they otherwise would never have encountered.
That shift from invisibility to visibility matters.
Public art can also create local pride, provoke conversations and turn an ordinary physical space into a symbol of collective identity.
Sometimes the first transformation isn't the neighborhood.
It's the way we perceive the people living there.
One Word at a Time
After 13 years, the scale of Share The Word is impressive: 256 murals and counting. Seb says the project is self-funded through his commissioned murals and artwork sales, allowing the work to continue independently. But numbers aren't really the heart of the project.
The power lies in its smallest unit:
one person choosing one word.
Muralism is usually associated with scale.
Huge walls.
Huge images.
Huge audiences.
Seb Toussaint's work reminds us that monumental art can begin with something incredibly small.
A conversation.
A word.
A wall.
And someone willing to listen.
Watch the Full Podcast with Seb
In our latest episode of the Global Muralism Podcast, Alfonso Corona sits down with Seb Toussaint to talk about his journey from football ultra culture to international muralism, why football became a universal language during his travels, the philosophy behind Share The Word, the advice to “not be too careful,” and what more than a decade of painting alongside communities around the world has taught him about art and humanity.
Watch: From Football Ultras to Refugee Camps: 256 Murals, 20+ Countries | Seb Toussaint
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