MODERNMURALMAGAZINE_FINALonline

lism and in the galleries ‚illustrations‘
or ‚paintings‘, but
Street Art, I don’t’ get it. I just
see the relationship with power
and marketing.
So which term would you
rather use?
I use the word name-writing-graffiti,
I use urban
practices, urban art - I’m
okay with the expressions,
it’s just saying what it is. You
don’t have Urban Art in Galleries,
but in two years you’re
going to have exhibitions
in Urban Art in galleries,
because they also fucked
up this term.
What I mean is, what I
like in Urban Art is actually,
street is kind of the street
credibility, like street marketing.
When you say ‚urban‘
you speak about urbanity
and urbanism. It’s already
something that is more complex
than using ‚street‘.
Street is just street-dealer,
there is no deep thought
about this term. It’s kind of
a bad-guys-thing you don’t
want to name properly, so
you just call it street - it’s kind
of condescending. So if I
need to use a term, I will say
Urban Art in English, but in
French I will say art urbaine.
There is art in urban space
and mostly what I’m using as
a term is ‚Art Practices in
Urban Space‘, because there
is no movement, there
is just a market with street
art, but there are also these
festivals for sure. But there
are surfing on it.
What I did here in Lisbon
was actually graffiti, let’s say,
conceptional graffiti. Like
lettering. I painted letters
and some kind of mural,
which was actually the copy
of a Google-form-survey I
did.
So it wasn’t like skilled, I didn’t
even decide the graphic
qualities of my own painting,
so I don’t see how it could
be this term ‚graffiti‘.I did
graffiti, but I past over some
erased names of writers that
were at the entrance of the
neighborhood, because the
municipality painted over it,
as the mayor was going to
visit the neighborhood, so I
found it very bad.
There is a local scene of
name-writers and they get
erased, because foreigners
get invited to invade their
neighborhood to do so called
‘beautiful paintings’, were
their own are somehow ugly?
I don’t get it. It’s not how these
things should work. So, I
just painted over andthere
was this ghost of the graffiti,
so I kind of did their graffiti,
which is disrespectful to the
traditional name-writing in
the conservative vision, but
that’s what I like to do, you
know, we are in 2016, we
are not in the 90s or in the
80s, so there are all of these
traditional, conservative values,
that everyone is copying,
but the most known people
are mostly not the ones
who are doing it conservatively,
so that’s again the
same question.
So I guess Name-writing is a
practice and when it comes
to art, it has to change a
bit, maybe become a painting.
It’s not even writing a
name, it’s going over it and
becoming an illustration.
So Name-Writing is just
name writing. You can be 16,
you can be 70, you can do it
with a crazy style or not - it’s
just a practice.
Do you see yourself as a
part of the movement you
just described? You sound
a little bit angry to what
happened to Urban Art
and the Name-Writing-Scene
and traditional graffiti,
but you too crossed other
people with your work, but
you still did it and took part
of the festival.
Well, actually in the same
time I was passing over the
guys’ painting on the wall, I
was paying tribute to them,
because that is the reason I
chose this graffiti of the local
Barrio Padre Cruz Crew.
It is kind of self critic, because
I was invited and what I
would have loved to do, but
that’s the problem of this terminology
of Street Art, is that
you have to work specific
on 10 days not having any
specific places, but just look
around and find out how
to interact, that’s somehow
what I did, but there was
also this relationship with the
financiers of the project, where
actually they wanted people
to come and ask us to do
something precisely and yes,
it’s a job, but I don’t get paid
for it, but also Pedro invited
me and I trust this guy and I
like to experiment with new
23