Faith47 Wynwood Walls Miami: Corda Nostra Una Palpitant

Faith47’s Corda Nostra Una Palpitant, painted at Wynwood Walls Miami during Miami Art Week, presents a scene of pursuit across a vast monochrome wall. A stag runs at full force while lions close in behind it, their bodies caught in the suspended moment between movement, hunger and impact.

Faith47’s Corda Nostra Una Palpitant, painted at Wynwood Walls Miami during Miami Art Week 2016. Image copyright Martha Cooper

The mural belongs to Faith47’s wider visual language, where animals, symbolic forms and weathered urban surfaces are used to explore power, vulnerability and the unseen forces that shape human experience. Born in South Africa, Faith47 has developed a practice that moves between the street, the studio and the spiritual. Her large-scale works often feel less like illustrations than apparitions, emerging through shadow, erosion, dust and restraint.

At Wynwood Walls under this years theme ‘Fearless’, this language takes the form of a hunt. Across the wall, the animals appear through grey, black and white washes, their forms both immediate and unstable. The lions are rendered with speed and force, while the stag’s body stretches forward in an urgent attempt to escape. The image is dramatic, but its meaning is not simply violent. Faith47 uses the relationship between predator and prey to consider instinct, dependence and the fragile systems that bind living beings together.

Faith47’s Corda Nostra Una Palpitant, painted at Wynwood Walls Miami during Miami Art Week 2016. Image copyright Martha Cooper (in detail).

The title, Corda Nostra Una Palpitant, can be understood as our hearts beat together. That translation changes the emotional weight of the mural. The animals are not arranged as moral opposites. The stag is not innocence alone, and the lions are not cruelty alone. They are held inside the same rhythm. One body runs from danger, another runs from hunger. Survival is shared, even when it is unequal.

This is where the work becomes more complex than its first impression. From a distance, the mural reads as a powerful animal scene, all motion, muscle and tension. Up close, the surface becomes looser and more wounded. The marks drag, bleed and dissolve into the wall. Faith47 does not polish the image into spectacle. Instead, she allows the mural to remain atmospheric, almost ghostlike, as though the scene is appearing and disappearing at the same time.

Faith47’s work often creates a space for reflection inside the noise of the city. Here, that reflection is not quiet in subject, but it is quiet in tone. The restrained palette, the bruised surface and the sense of suspended motion give the mural a strange grace. It asks the viewer to consider the ancient forces still moving beneath contemporary life: fear, hunger, pursuit, escape and interdependence.

As a public artwork, Corda Nostra Una Palpitant refuses easy beauty. It is beautiful, but not comfortable. It shows life as something shared, unstable and constantly in motion. The hunt becomes more than an image of survival. It becomes a reminder that all living beings move within the same pulse, even when they are moving against one another.

Read more about this year’s theme ‘Fearless’ at Wynwood Walls.