“I was born and raised in Ivory Coast. I’ve been through 3 civil wars. All my childhood, I witnessed scenes of hate and death. Scenes such as a young Ivorian girl who was surrounded by corpses while my family and I were being evacuated in a French tank. Her look will forever be etched into my memory. Or such as this group of 50 men who were fighting with machetes in front of my house while I was playing on my Playstation. By the age of 10, I had a knife to be able to defend myself.
These things mark you, they force you to think and to grow up faster. 

I’ve been drawing ever since I was a kid. My inspirations range from Dragon Ball Z to the Renaissance and tribal cultures : I love the human values and message of fighting for what you believe in that they carry. Drawing for me is a way to clear my mind and my soul. 

My mother encouraged me to enroll in fine arts. She herself wanted to become an artist when she was younger. That’s how I arrived in Lebanon in 2012. I was 18. My parents are Lebanese, they let me choose to come to Lebanon for my studies. Here I discovered a really complex and creative youth. I found myself, I belong in this society. 

Since I got  to Lebanon I worked on political drawings, where I denounce the corruption and all the things that go wrong in the country. I started getting published in 2014. But nothing ever changed. 

So before the revolution started, I was considering a change in my career. I was getting tired of Lebanon, I needed some air. I wanted to explore drawing for animation and music and I was thinking of  moving out to discover other parts of the world. 

The night the revolution started, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night and drew a phoenix. It was a way to represent the Lebanese people who got burned several times and who tried to rebuild themselves. When I published the drawing, I wanted to give energy and hope to the people. 

The next day, my cousins called me to tell me that people were painting on the walls in the streets of Beirut, and that I had to join them. So I went down and I drew on a wall for the first time. People were watching me and helping me, it was a truly positive experience. It was my way of protesting: I wanted to represent the feelings of people, their messages. It was a call to resistance. 

This revolution reminds me of my childhood in Ivory Coast, it brings back memories of how people fought against the corrupt political class in order to have a decent life.  In the end, this fight is the plight of most humans beings. 

Today, I’m so invested in the revolution that I can’t leave anymore. I want to do all that I can as a young boy, a citizen and an artist to support this revolution. But if it doesn’t succeed, if we go back to the previous vicious circle, I will leave.
Here we don’t live, we survive. I just want to be happy.”

Ivan Debs, 26, artist

Text & pic: Jeanne-Lore Garcia