Trophées ArchiCOTE

Trophy graffiti

Zed is the creator if the ‘Flexo’ figures awarded to winners of the ArchiCOTE competition for the past 10 years. 

This year, his son Weko joined him in designing and making these iconic sculptures.

Dossier réalisé par Tanja Stojanov

David Zeller, a.k.a. Zed, reinvents his favourite character Flexo every year, giving it new poses, gestures, materials, colours and formats. Flexo poses so as to express the emotions we humans pass through in our daily lives. Now, Flexo also stands at intervals along the route followed by 18 young Alsatian lads who refused conscription into the Nazi armed forces and paid with their lives in 1943. “I asked the school students involved in the project to associate colours with the emotions they felt. Fuchsia came to symbolise hope, white was solidarity, turquoise blue was hesitation, and so on,” says Zed. In all there are seven of these large sculptures along those young men’s route towards Switzerland, before they were arrested and executed at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Zed wants to pass on these truths of history to the younger generation, but with a message of hope. Now, Zed has the good fortune to be working with his 18-year-old son Isaak, a.k.a. Weko, who has been studying art in Italy. Weko has decorated a new collection of Flexos called Club des Graffs, in street art style with big, round, quickly-scribbled letters, giving an impression of movement. This year’s ArchiCOTE trophy is decorated this way, as are the Flexos the father and son will be showing at the Art3f fairs in Mulhouse, Brussels, Paris and Toulouse this autumn and Lyon and Milan next Spring.