The dude standing there is the artist, Sipho Mabona:
This life-sized white elephant stands 3m (10 ft) tall and weighs a whopping 250kg (550lbs) – and it was all folded out of a single 15m x 15m (50ft x 50ft) sheet of paper. The epic piece of paper art took a team of up to ten people four weeks to complete. They financed the project through an Indiegogo campaign, which raised $26,000. The money allowed the team to work on the project continuously for an entire month and to capture the entire process on film.
In a 2011 interview, Mabona talked about his passion for paper art and when it began:
When I was a kid, I always used to throw paper airplanes out of our kitchen window into our neighbor’s garden but I couldn’t pick them up because their garden wasn’t accessible and, on top of that, they had this vicious dog. The landlord wrote letters to my parents saying that I should quit throwing those planes. The planes kept flying and the letters kept coming. I only quit throwing airplanes when the landlord threatened to kick us out of our apartment.
Watch a video of the construction process here. See more of Mabona’s work here.
(Photo by Philipp Schmidli)
The Dish 