Falko One

Falko One, who also signs Falko1 or Falko Fantastic, is a South African artist from Cape Town, widely regarded as one of the pioneers of graffiti in the country. He started painting in 1988, aged 16, on a school wall in the Mitchells Plain township. Since 2014 he has been best known for his elephants, the first of them painted in Dakar: animals drawn to fit their wall, working around a door, a window or a pipe instead of covering it. His Once Upon A Town project (2015) took him from town to town across South Africa, painting elephants on houses in underserved communities to shift ideas about what counts as valuable and to get neighbours talking to each other. In August 2016 he left a trail of pastel elephants through the streets of Stockwell and Brixton in London.