Bilal Berreni [ Zoo Project ]

Zoo Project, pseudonym of Bilal Berreni, is a French urban painter, born June 23, 1990 in Paris and murdered on July 29, 2013 in Detroit (United States) at the age of 23. His work was first exhibited on the walls of northeast Paris, then in Tunisia, just after the Tunisian revolution of 2010-2011, where it was particularly noticed.

Bilal Berreni was born in the 10th arrondissement of Paris on June 23, 19902 to a mother from Périgord and a father of Algerian origin, Mourad Berreni, director and director of the Théâtre de l'Echo in the 20th arrondissement. He has an older brother Marwan, an actor, and is the grandson of Charles Sarlandie, chief of staff of the Resistance within the Violette Battalion in Saint-Mesmin, in Dordogne. A Parisian teenager from the 20th arrondissement, Bilal Berreni began painting walls in his neighborhood at the age of 15. At 18, he created the name “Zoo Project”. At the Boulle school, he took a baccalaureate in applied arts then joined the École Duperré where he obtained a BTS in graphic communication. He paints large black and white frescoes on the walls of Parisian buildings and in Sénéchas in the Cévennes which he signs Zoo Project, the name he wishes to give to a collective of which he will remain the only member. He has a strong interest in the work of Ernest Pignon-Ernest but also in more traditional painters like Gustave Courbet or Ingres.

Zoo Project gained notoriety in 2011 thanks to his work in Tunisia where he painted life-size portraits of victims of the revolution on cardboard which he exhibited in the streets of Tunis: for him, “Drawing is no longer an onanist act , navel-gazing, but a political, civic, citizen action, in touch with the world.” After Tunis, he reached the eastern border of Tunisia and the Choucha camp where he settled and shared for a month the life of thousands of refugees who had fled the Libyan civil war and painted their portraits on white canvas banners. Back in Paris, Zoo Project finds a certain solitude. He then returned for several months to eastern Europe and Russia in search of the "ghosts of the former USSR" and produced, in collaboration with director Antoine Page, a documentary combining cinema and drawing, "C' It's Good Enough to Be Mad." In this film, we see Zoo Project painting on the walls of a farm, on containers or even on an old boat in the dried-up Aral Sea, bringing the crew of the abandoned ship back to life. It's Good Enough to Be Crazy was released in 2013 in a few theaters and screened at festivals.

In July 2013, Zoo Project was found dead, shot to death at the age of 23, in an abandoned building in Detroit in the United States, but his body was not identified until March 2014: he was murdered on the 29th. July by a group of young men aged 17 to 20 who killed him to steal his money. The murderer and his accomplices were arrested by the Detroit police on September 3, 2014 and were sentenced by the courts to several decades in prison during trials held in 2015 and 2016.