When waste becomes a work of art—street artist Bisk turns Paris garbage into upbeat installations

One man’s rubbish is another man’s canvas, as the saying goes (apparently). This is certainly the case with the French street artist Bisk who is turning the mounds of waste on Paris’s streets—piled up in the wake of pension reform protests—into quirky art creations by adding graffitied eyes and polystyrene smiles. “People come by all serious, then see a monster’s face or a little man, and they leave with a smile. People have thanked me for puncturing the mood,” Bisk told The Times of India. Le Monde describes how these “monsters”—as Bisk calls them—takes shape, saying: “Amazon's logo serves as an ironic eyebrow, two symmetrical garbage cans as a moustache, and a cardboard box taped in black [becomes] a scar.” The arty detritus—posted on the artist’s Instagram feed—is certainly making Parisians laugh amongst the upheaval. “Keep beautifying these piles of dirt,” says a contributor while another adds that the heaps of rotting debris “have irresistible faces”.