Anonymous British street artist Banksy unveiled his latest work in the London suburb of Bayswater on Monday – two days after a similar graffiti appeared on Oxford Street in the heart of the city’s bustling shopping district.
Black and white graffiti, which was posted on a Instagram The page, generally considered to be Banksy’s official account, depicts two children wearing winter jackets, hats and Wellington boots lying on their backs, looking up and pointing towards a red light above a crane rising up in the background.
The image shows the side of a dilapidated-looking house just above a garage, making it appear as if children are lying on a corrugated iron roof, next to a roof littered with trash and discarded furniture and kitchen equipment.
The same motif appeared several miles away in central London over the weekend — on Saturday morning, according to local Instagram users, who wondered why Banksy didn’t share that version on his official channel.
On that mural, on a small wall at the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, children are seen pointing towards London’s controversial Centrepoint Tower. , A luxury 34-storey apartment block built in the 1970s that was once occupied by activists protesting against the lack of affordable housing in the city, where homelessness is still on the rise.
According to the latest statistics, about 210,000 people are forced to sleep on the streets of the British capital, almost half of whom are children. , This includes Oxford Street, where Christmas shoppers are replaced by homeless people after hundreds of shops close for the night.
What is Banksy trying to tell us?
“I think it’s very clear that people are running past this graffiti in the same way they run past homeless people they don’t want to see,” Banksy fan and sketcher Daniel Lloyd-Morgan told the German public broadcaster. daily news“I think that’s what Banksy wants to draw our attention to,”
Other passersby had different explanations.
“If it’s Banksy, maybe he’s trying to say: look at the city, admire its sights,” said one. daily news“Maybe it’s a fallen soldier with the child inside him showing him the way to heaven,” suggested another,
On Instagram, one user commented beneath Banksy’s post: “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” , Quoting the character Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play, Lady Windermere’s fan,
Another pointed to the timing of the two frescoes which coincided with the winter solstice on Sunday, December 21, the shortest and darkest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
One wrote simply: “All we want for Christmas is Banksy.”
Edited by: Dmytro Lyubenko