Urbanario

Al comenzar los noventa tuve la suerte de conocer a algunos de los artistas más influyentes en el graffiti europeo, que entonces comenzaba a madurar. Entre otras visitas, las que más me marcaron fueron las que hice a Escandinavia, desde siempre uno de los principales ejes estilísticos del continente. Especialmente Finlandia es conocida por haber generado una manera de entender el graffiti alejada de todo convencionalismo y esencialmente divertida.

En aquellos años anteriores a internet los únicos vehículos para conocer el graffiti de otros países eran las revistas de aficionados fotocopiadas, los fanzines, que circulaban por correo. Como toda capital, Helsinki tuvo su fanzine producido por escritores de graffiti, el Gasmask, del cual se editaron cinco números, entre 1990 y 1992.

El equipo original de la revista ha estado preparando una reedición de los cinco números en un volumen único titulado Gasmask 6, the lost issue, que acaba de aparecer. Entre el numeroso material nuevo incluido en la edición está el texto que he escrito para la ocasión y os dejo a continuación. En él hablo del graffiti autóctono madrileño de los 80, aquella generación del Muelle, y del graffiti finlandés, al hilo todo ello de mi vivencia personal y del graffiti que produje bajo el nombre de Garrulo o Garr alrededor del año 2003.

Incluye algunos términos de argot del graffiti. La palabra “buff” se refiere a la limpieza de graffitis. Las imágenes de graffiti autóctono madrileño son de los archivos de Remebe y Einsamkeit.

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Madrid eighties writing scene, Scandinavia, and Garrulo

I hadn’t been active as a writer for years when i started sketching the ideas that eventually took form in these pieces. Those were sweet times for me, no work and lots of time to spend doing nothing. I lived in an old brick building in a pedestrian street in Madrid old city.

Garrulo was all about trying to climb beyond years of self-education as a perfectionist simple-letter writer by invoking the punk graffiti vibe from my teen years. It was also my humble proposal after the seminal work of folk hero and dear friend Inupie. It was about finding a Madrilenian alternative to the style that some years before Inupie had headed from Barcelona and which came to be one of the main trademarks of european writing. Led by the desire to find my own way of stripping graffiti to barebone purity i turned to my roots, to the paleograffiti scene i grew up in.

Before the advent of New York writing culture there was this guy in Madrid who started writing on his own, with his own invented style, formal language and methodological values. A punk, new wave kid from the working-class southern neighbourhood of Campamento, Muelle was to become a citywide phenomenom for years, and a synonym of graffiti for everyone, old and young. And most importantly, after him came a whole generation of writers with no other reference of graffiti than the work of each other and of the scene leader.

The indigenous graffiti scene of Madrid was romantic by today’s standards. Painting on trains was unheard-of and a socially conscious ethos existed, emanating from Muelle himself, that made most writers stay away from monuments and the like, and to focus on construction site walls, subway posters, and other surfaces that need no buff. Pieces were nonexistent and getting up with an unchanging logo-tag was the norm. A filled-in and outlined version of your tag was the thing to do when you wanted to go big, not unlike today’s grapixo from São Paulo. Visual references were taken from punk, metal and commercial graphics.

A relleno (fill-in) or grosor (width) by Muelle from around 1989.

Glub is still active today.

Josesa Punk, one of the style leaders.

Jojass Punk, one of Josesa’s followers.

This scene took over for the best part of the eighties and was the background for the most subculturally active years the city remembers, when Madrid was the heart of an explosion with which a country was spasmodically shaking off forty years of political enclosure. The scene only started to fade by the end of the decade, when New York writing gradually took its place in what was more a natural transition than an abrupt take over. Like myself, most of the main actors in the new scene had in fact been involved in the old one for years, and adopted the new set of rules as a way to have even more fun, after being exposed to Style Wars and the like.

In the start of the nineties i found myself leading the first scene of writers focused on piecing on subways. We were aware of the emerging european train scenes through the first xeroxed magazines, then coming to Spain, which had made the sight of pieces running in traffic a possibility in our minds. Although it was still to take some time, the scene would eventually become strong enough to live its golden era when panels would be in circulation for weeks.

The first european train writers to come to Madrid were Hick, Midas, Mer and Dudge, through an initial contact made with Wagon from Stockholm. That was 1990 or 91, and after that i went to Helsinki and Stockholm a couple of times, in what i guess was the first visit paid by a mediterranean train writer. The scandinavian attitude was an early influence in my way of enjoying graffiti. I was witness to how its free-range spirit became the nurturing soil for the roots of the style that Inupie was to lead by the end of the decade, and which would make a continent’s eyes turn to Barcelona and Paris.

After closely watching Inupie come up with his way of mining graffiti-pureness, i strived to find my own scheme for playing with the boiled-down essence of graffiti. It was in the memory of my first years as a writer where i found the feeling i needed. One of the core visual trends in the indigenous graffiti scene of the eighties was punk-rock angular rigidity, something i adopted as a frame on which to build the style. Thin, unmodulated strokes in the letters come from the filled-in and outlined tags Muelle made popular. Some elements in tags are directly adopted from the indigenous vocabulary. Brazilian and scandinavian heritage make part of the mix as well.

It’s been already some years since i made these pieces, and since i have been writing at all. I now find myself teaching all this to fine arts students in an university class about what i call independent public art. I speak about graffiti, postgraffiti, site-specific intervention, artivism, and the like, and students make their own urban intervention projects. Send your graffiti-clueless nephew for an Erasmus year in Madrid!