cities a "flesh of the street" (he retranslates it peau de la rue ). Moulding objects and collecting ephemera from various streets, Rachid put together 21 figures of "children", ambassadors of cities entering a new century. A more recent public project involved the installation of 1,000 bronze tortoises on Omaha Beach in 2011, to commemorate the landings of Allied troops (above). There are several tortoises, in plastic and bronze, on the floor of the Friedman & Vallois gallery in New York -- and I'm reminded of the tortoise in Huysmans's novel A Rebours (Against Nature) whose shell is encrusted with jewels. Rachid's tortoises, however, are cast in bronze and moulded by the shape of the helmets of the soldiers who fought in the D-Day campaign. Tortoises, Rachid says, are used in north Africa to clean the house, at the same time as warding off "bad luck and evil spirits". The tortoise is "a symbol of wisdom" and a metaphor for the longevity of war. The works reminds me of Jacob Epstein's Rock Drill or Picasso's work in bronze, and Rachid talks of its relation to art of the early 20th century: "they said never again, but every decade there are more wars." In Mozambique Gonalo Mabunda has also, recently, been making tribal masks from weapons. Rachid's newer works, also on display, are masks and totems cast in bronze: poetic images forged in a furnace. He uses discarded objects and disused parts of machines, to create new human and animal forms.