M athieu, how did Street art or muralism changed the way graffiti used to be? Is it still possible to achieve something through this if you are getting paid to do it, get the paint and get the walls? So, actually, myself, I am, I was, still some kind of writer, graffiti writer, but I also used to do and I still do, let’s call it European name writing, not American name writing graffiti. That is also my background and that’s the reason I came to Name-writing and that I do not consider myself neither a street-artist, nor a muralist. Muralism has kind of a tradition for me, which is based on various places on earth. Here in Portugal we can say that after the revolution in the 70s there were murals, kind of a movement of muralism, which was socially engaged and it was same in Dublin and Mexico. So than you get that muralism topic that came back perhaps or some kind of reminiscence or a loop related to graffiti and street art. And it started to appear after the phase when graffiti went into decoration, the way municipalities in the mid 90s to the mid 2000s did. Actually graffiti was used to remove tags from the city because they knew, they understood that there was this kind of scale of respect that were tags. You got throw-up, graffiti pieces, fresco. And when you are in fresco, supposedly, the guys are enough respected from the street, so that nobody will go over their fresco. If this is muralism related to graffiti, this exists as a form of name writing graffiti. Then you’ve got that also that writer, or kind of illustrator, but acting in the streets so maybe it would called street art, but for me it is muralism. In France, some were in Europe doing that kind of triumph muralism illegal, well let’s say legal, but it was not about legal or illegal. It was about doing painting in spaces that nobody cared about. Those were better than known places, so maybe because of them or because of the fact that for example in 2007 or 2006 BLUE came to ASALTO Festival in Spain and started to do a few murals without permission, almost without being invited. He just arrived and said ‚Hey guys, can I paint this here?‘ - They said yes. So it went kind of viral on the internet, because it was also the beginning of the Web 2.0, of blogging and social networks and went beyond the use that was, some kind of underground. Then with Facebook and blogs, you get that crossover from involved users and almost random users. So actually suddenly in the end of the 2000s, there was this muralism, where people asked writers to do these kind of big scale paintings. So yes, it depends on what you’re talking about, if there is some kind of muralism, we have to define if it’s name writing related muralist, which could be big, but it was always background, characters, small pieces that were brought by authors or by municipalities. Not that quality muralism, besides of the rules of exercise. Then you’ve got that, let’s say One-Author-Muralism, sometimes very specific, sometimes with some kind of discourse, which wasn’t the case of most of the graffiti-writing muralism. And then: Street Art. For me it is very symbolic and précising, but only when we talk to about people from the beginning. Street Art is an American name for something somehow existing in different places, e.g. in France it is Art de la Rue. So there already existed a word. Remember a time when you called Street Art, Art de la Rue. So it is interesting to find the point where people stopped using their own name for Street Art to use the American one and what it changed. Because Art de la Rue in France was really a condescending form of a guy doing a living statue, space art. It was the idea of doing something in the street, but getting paid directly for it - like a spectacle. But it was also a way for a Hip Hop connected guy or municipality to talk about something that they don’t reco- 18
»Besides the history of the exhibition space with which you can play, you also have this mind space, white space without anything that could disturb your attention, so can say precisely say the things you want to say, which is not the case when you do it in a big space.« 19
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