Opinion Sur Joven

Next weekend is coming up and Brook, who is 20, has already planned what to do during those days. He’s not going to a famous disco, playing football or hanging around with friends on the corner. He has a different project. “Instead of going out and fighting with someone, I choose to channel that energy into something more positive, like carrying with me the image of my graffiti on a train. Sometimes I spend a whole weekend in the subway tunnels, looking for places to paint.”

How did he get started? "Through a French friend, who often traveled and bought the paint with euros. Then he would invite me to check the places. That’s how I started contacting people from Chile, Brazil, Spain and Germany. I started skating, and I also liked drawing comics and anime. But when I found out about graffiti and the possibility to put my name on the streets, I wanted it all”, he tells us.

Tazco, another young writer, got started in a similar way: “I started in 2003, when I was 16. First, by means of street experiences like skating. Then, I thought about doing graffiti when a friend started to show me the tags".

According to written theories on the subject, these paintings are not an individual phenomenon, but a social-cultural expression of the youth; this phenomenon corresponds with organized behavior in certain groups acting in a consistent and evolving manner within the cities, where, at the same time, they express their senses of belongingness and inclusion.

“Personally, I leave my tag everywhere I go. For example, by following tags and checking out if there are many of them in a corner, I can find their writers’ hiding places”, Brook tells us, and he adds that “graffiti is pure marketing, because what I do on the streets is publicity for people getting to know me”.

Different reactions

We may consider this artistic expression as a way of rebelling against the authorities or against institutions failing to solve social problems.

“I paint graffiti because I found a meaning to my life in them. If I didn’t paint, I don’t know what I’d do. Although I’m inside the system, have a job, work with my motorcycle and make a living on tips, to me that’s not my life. I have a different life, where I can imagine colors and shapes for my next graffiti", Brook acknowledges.

But, as we mentioned before, a painting on a wall, along a train or under a bridge must not be deemed as performed by an individual, but as a made by a group of people who are organized for said purpose.

“The crew is a group of friends who have a set of letters identifying them. With your friends of the crew you go out and paint on the streets and share a lot of things”, Tazco explains.

For example, Brook is one of the founders and current members of the “B2” crew. “Our crew is different from all crews in Argentina. We include the four elements of Hip Hop: Dj, graffiti, breakdance and rap. (...) The different crews compete for the best style, the richest vocabulary when rhyming and the neatest graffiti", he explains.

Meanwhile, there are different reactions upon paintings. Especially when the writers “express” themselves on private trains and subways or on the walls of private properties.

“It represents a cost for the company. We only have regular security for passengers, we have no special surveillance staff to prevent trains from being painted", we are told by Flavia, from the Passenger Support Center for the Sarmiento railway line of TBA (Buenos Aires Railway Company). “People are miseducated and don’t take care of the transportation they use themselves. Then they complain, but transportation is not taken care of. It’s a problem involving people’s education", she complains.

In the case of the subways, graffiti are not a serious problem, although in the Passenger Support Center of Metrovías they confirm that “they usually paint corridors and platforms, and then the cleaning staff has to erase them with special products”.

Instead, neighbors and storekeepers whose walls appear painted overnight do react in anger. “If I ever catch the guy who did this, I’ll kill him. It’s been there for a year now, and I can’t remove it with anything”, says Osvaldo, from Villa Urquiza, when asked by Opinión Sur Joven about the tag on the front of his house. “If they’re so fond of painting, why don’t they do it at their homes?”, he wonders. “We’ve always had graffiti, they were already here when we moved in. We don’t want to clean the walls because we know they’ll paint them again the next day", we are told by Silvia, who is in charge of a costume hire business in the same neighborhood. “We’re living in an isolated society. The people who do this should get psychological treatment. I’m talking about the fact of scribbling other people’s walls at night”, she says.

Meanwhile, both writers acknowledge having had troubles with the law.

“Once I was caught, along with a friend, after having painted trains in Tigre. We were inexperienced, so we got on the same train we had painted to go home. When the police arrived, our hands were dirty and we were carrying a bag full of spray paint and tips”, Tazco recalls.

“They took us to a TBA office and then to the police station, where they kept us for a while. When my old man came to pick me up, they warned us that they had filed a claim, but they’ve never called us yet", he points out.

One of the favorite outings for “B”, Brook’s crew, is to go tagging up trains. “We’ve got it all sorted out. We hide where they can’t see us, but we can see them. We check the places from there, and if the security staff leaves for five minutes, we paint and we’re out of there seven minutes later”, Brook explains.

However, “if you go to an empty layup and a security employee or, even worse, a paramilitary policeman sees you, he’ll shoot you with rubber bullets”, he warns.

Graffiti may also become a legal economic resource. “I worked for Channel 7, Channel 9 and Fox Sports, and now I’m working on some special shoes for Converse”, Brook acknowledges. “I’m working with my cousin on designing my tag for T-shirts, shaping it in a particular way to make it look like a logo”, Tazco comments.

A lifestyle

Streets, bridges, trains and railways are the urban spaces used by graffiti writers to gain a place or collaborate in crews. Maybe writers want their identities to be acknowledged within a society which still doesn’t allow them to be independent from a family in crisis, or within a global economy looking for cheap and successful labor.

They defend their “art” and explain their inner feelings while painting. Tazco feels like he’s taking “short vacations” from his dull day-to-day life. “It makes me feel very relaxed, very free. Also, in a way I feel more mature, because every graffiti I make improves my style, my way of painting, a lot of things".

For Brook, graffiti “implies an artistic matter, though on the other hand it implies an adventure to feel adrenaline”. Besides, when he starts painting a wall where painting is allowed, he feels the world “just stops spinning”. And he concludes: “It’s pretty hard to explain, a very mystical thing. It’s just you and the wall, nothing else. I’m not sure why I do all this, but I do know I just can’t stop”.