Swiss artistic duo NEVERCREW has unveiled “Paper-thin,” a new mural at Parc des Chaumettes in Geneva, directly in front of Geneva University Hospitals (HUG). Presented on August 19 for World Humanitarian Day, the work was realized for Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland and HUG, with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the World Health Organization and the Canton of Geneva also involved in its inauguration.
Created by Christian Rebecchi and Pablo Togni, “Paper-thin” addresses the protection of health care in armed conflict. Its central image is a large sheet of paper, visibly damaged and suspended above a group of people involved in giving and receiving care. Torn, pierced and burnt, the sheet becomes a partial roof: an attempted shelter with gaps that leave those beneath it exposed.
The image refers to UN Security Council Resolution 2286, adopted on May 3, 2016. The resolution strongly condemns violence, attacks and threats against wounded and sick people, medical and humanitarian personnel engaged in medical duties, their transport and equipment, and hospitals and other medical facilities during armed conflict. Ten years on, NEVERCREW’s mural focuses on the distance between that written commitment and the dangers faced by patients, health workers and humanitarian teams in conflict zones.
“The sheet becomes a roof that suggests protection, but its holes show that this protection is vulnerable,” NEVERCREW said of the work. “It speaks to the distance between commitments made on paper and the violence that continues to affect medical and humanitarian workers in conflict zones.”
The paper is not treated simply as a symbol of legislation. Within the composition, it is also a document carrying photographic traces, bringing images of past attacks into the work’s surface. Memory is present alongside the fragility of the structure overhead: a record of violence, but also a reminder that protection depends on action beyond declarations.
Its placement is integral to the project. Installed outside a working public hospital in Geneva, “Paper-thin” brings the subject out of diplomatic and institutional settings and into a daily public environment shared by patients, hospital staff and passers-by. HUG Director-General Robert Mardini described hospitals as places of “care, dignity and humanity,” framing the mural as an expression of solidarity with people seeking or providing care under violence.
For a duo known for precise, pared-back visual constructions, NEVERCREW uses a direct image here: a sheet of paper that should offer protection but cannot fully do so. The mural does not illustrate Resolution 2286 as a fixed legal text. Instead, it pictures its central problem—what happens when the safeguards written on paper fail to hold in reality.
Source: StreetArt - streetartnews.net
