cover artical on haifa city graffiti on the biggest local paper...
translation by mork:
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
In the dead of night, with safety masks on their faces, Krazy Bob, Unga, Tant, Kip, Deso, Aifo2 and Soke go on a colorful raid on naked concrete walls around Haifa, all in the name of art. Only that the following day the municipality sends inspectors that erase it all.
By Ido Solomon, Enbal Cohen. Photos by Yaron Zor-Levi.
Translated by Mork.
The white Mitsubishi stops quietly on the asphalt and behind it halts the red Peugeot. "Shov" school parking space, which during the day is full of students, is now empty. From the vehicles seven young men come out, dressed black and armed with bags and boxes. When they reach the fence, Unga, walking in front, give one of the bags to Soke, while Deso stands a small distance with his back to the group and watches over the empty street. Krazy Bob, Unga, Tant, Kip, Deso, Aifo2 and Soke – graffiti artists that agree to identify themselves only by their aliases – advance in a single file and in fast steps to the desired wall. Blue police lights flicker over their heads. Aifo2 advises to wait a few minutes. The wall aren’t going anywhere, the cops are. A few seconds pass, Unga nods slightly, and like trained elite soldiers the guys take out the masks, tighten the straps, pick their first spray paint, and head to scout the area.
The pungent smell of the spray spreads in the air when the seven start working. Every once in a while, one of them peeks at his sketch that he prepared a few hours back. The others exchange cans of paint amongst themselves. In silence and concentration they work in front of the walls, completely detached from the late hour and the abandoned place. Once every few minutes a car is heard in the background, but the monotonous soundtrack is comprised by the rattle of the cans and the sound of the spray. Kip says that once they put down the final outline it will look "fucking great". Over the next hour and a half the scribbles start to acquire a color and form. The group pass critic and throw remarks. The smell of the paint dilutes to smell of the cigarette they roll with such skill.
When you talk to them about graffiti you find out that they see themselves as no less than artists. Marginal artists, but still avant-garde, at least in local terms. "Anyone here is an adrenaline junkie," says Krazy Bob, "its one of the things about graffiti, just like an extreme sport. Sometimes its better then sex."
The First Crew in Northern Israel
Graffiti, in its many forms, exists from time immemorial. The prehistoric man drew on the cave walls, and Napoleon's troops marked structures they pass by in their conquest campaigns. In its modern form, graffiti that is in every city and in all the continents started to appear in the seventies and form alongside the Hip-Hop subculture during the eighties. In cities like London, Berlin and New York its hard to find an empty wall in the subway, and there are even some artists that sell their work for thousands of dollars.
The graffiti group that we escorted is only one of a few dozens in Israel. They estimate that in Haifa alone there are at least 20 writers, graffiti junkies, crazy over scribble on walls. The basic idea is simple: the public space belongs to us all, and mostly it's gray and depressing, so why not give it some color? The fact that graffiti is illegal doesn’t really bother them. On the contrary.
Early during the evening we meet them at the rented apartment of Kip and Unga, which looks like the cliché of a bachelors pad. A collection of empty beer bottles in the kitchen, witty posters on the walls and mostly a lot of mess evenly distributed all over the space. They both met in art class in high school, then they met Krazy Bob, that returned from Germany after consuming an overdose of graffiti and decided to start the first graffiti crew in the north. That was their first graffiti group. Krazy Bob was crowned unofficially the guru, and since then their together. The crew is the accepted format in the scene. Usually it’s a group of writers with a similar style that group together to create graffiti together. But the activity doesn’t sum up to the night action.
"When I walk down the street I try to write on as many places as I can," Kip tells, "in graffiti there's a part that's art and a part that is a game. The art is to make creations on the walls and the game takes place in a different place. During the gang days, the street gangs in the states, graffiti was used to mark territory. When a certain gang's graffiti is on a wall you know it's their territory, where they would push drugs. I don’t really deal with the violent part, but the basis remains. Each writer wants to get to as many places as possible so a lot of people see his work. When someone from another crew sees stuff by my crew, he'll put his mark next to it to show that he was there too. Just like skaters look for stairs to jump over, we look for place to write on."
"In the Horev center for instance, above Bank Leumi, there's a big white rectangle, that's waiting for someone to write on it", Unga adds, "we're all waiting to see who's gonna be the first to do that, and he'll get a lot of respect. The scene here is cool, nice people that do it for fun. There's no mess here. It's not like abroad, that in order to be seen you need to work years. Here you can write graffiti one day and everybody will see it, 'cause Haifa is a small city."
A Painting that only an Atomic Bomb will Erase
They're 18-25 years old. Some of them are graphic artists, students, high-school kids and even one gas station worker – young guys that look like your next door neighbor's kids, and sometimes it's hard to understand what makes them want to go out in nights and paint, and more over, to risk breaking the law and get a penalty. "When you get into it, you cant quit and stop," Soke explains, "the feeling, like we said, is like an extreme sport. You witness your progress, you want to paint, and you don’t really care what people will say. It’s a sensation of creating something new."
And the fact that you are actually criminals?
"The illegal thing is part of it", says Unga, "the adrenaline flows when we're doing it, but that not really why we do it. We give the street art, and in no way do we see it as vandalism. The writers in Haifa have an ethics code. You won't see graffiti on a shop window, on a private house or on a synagogue. On the other hand, if there's an empty concrete wall, I don’t see why not to decorate it. The world today isn't utopian, it’s a world where someone who has money can make decisions. It pisses me off that others make decision about the public space. I think that what we do is very naïve and beautiful, that doesn’t harm anyone. We're just guys who do art. In the same manner that I did graffiti, someone else can come and erase what I did and do something new. Its part of the street – its dynamic and ever-changing."
Krazy Bob cant hold himself anymore and for a moment it looks like he's going to demonstrate the way he got his name. "Who's this Coca-Cola brand that decided that I need to see its signs everywhere?" he defies, "or Orange or any commercial company. I'm sure I can do it better."
Aifo2 adds. "We're surrounded by endless brands and endless names that jump straight to our eyes", he says, "what exactly is the difference between the Coca-Cola ads and our signatures everywhere? We can't decide if we want to see it or not. The difference is that they have millions of dollars that enables them to buy that space legally."
And after all the socialistic rage, Unga concluded: "we live in a world that is controlled buy real-estate sharks and people that want their own good. I'm not saying that what we're doing is legal, but in the existing reality I see it as something positive of adding art and beauty to the street."
The fact that he and his friends make decision for the public space without consideration doesn’t really matter to them. And if you're asking yourselves where the parents are in this thing, you'll get a surprising answer here.
"My mom is an art teacher and my parents know that I love art", says Unga, "so it doesn't bother them that I'm doing this, and they understand me." Kip rushes to add: "My mom is a psychologist and my dad is a chemistry lecturer. My parents also know I smoke drugs, and on the rebellious side they don’t take it too hard, because they see it in another light. My dad saw some of my works and was really excited. They support me."
And if it was legal, could it take out all of the fun?
"If graffiti was legal," says Aifo2, "I'd like to take the stone wall on the side of the Freud road and not just to paint on it, but to carve my name, so that only an atomic bomb could erase it. I'm all for legal graffiti to make the city better looking."
"A person works from eight to five," adds Krazy Bob, "and he has the whole kids and mortgage mess, he doesn’t have the time to go to the museum so he can enjoy some art. For people like that we turn the street into a museum".
Haifa against the Qrayut. And Vice Versa.
Against the motivation driven guys the authorities have recently placed the graffiti patrol, which has the job of erasing the subverted creations. The group thinks that's the old generation's way of telling them they aren’t wanted. "The municipality is trying every possible way to get the young people out of Haifa", rages Unga, "the only thing that's happening in this city, culture-wise, is the graffiti scene. We invest so much time and thought into it, and instead of nurturing and seeing the positive, the city authorities fight us exaggeratedly. They assigned a special anti-graffiti squad, which goes around all day long and erases the graffiti with a special machine they order from abroad."
"Graffiti itself is the message," explains Kip, "its something a lot more important than a bunch of kids scribbling on the walls for their own fun, and because of that we find it important to be the best and most original in our projects."
"Only in our country, and especially in Haifa, its still hard to accept this phenomenon," says Unga, "the city authorities see it as vandalism. There are cities in the world that give writers legal walls. Maybe they need to consider that sort of thing here as well".
"Sometimes I ask myself who is the stupid architect that decided to build the most ugly buildings," says Tant, "you see places where they destroy the mountain and nature with all sorts of concrete monsters. These are thing you can't bring back. Graffiti, on the other hand, you can always erase."
Are there wars between groups of writers?
"In Haifa there have recently been two wars", explains Aifo2, "when someone goes over someone else's stuff, from that they those two will write over each other on purpose, and you can't forget that behind them stand their crews. There were wars between a crew from Haifa and one from the Qrayut, but you need to understand that in the end this war means that one day I write over you, and the next you write over me, nothing more than that."
Why do you think it's important to let you continue?
"Graffiti gives you that boom of 'take a step back and understand that you are just a person that creates in the street'. You see it abroad. There, when you walk down the street, you see that all the walls are covered with graffiti. You feel that the city is alive, that all the citizens have a voice and have something to say."
"Beyond any ideology," Deso concludes, "graffiti expresses rudeness and the willingness and ability to create something against. I'm the one who decides how the street will look, and so I'm rude. It comes from a place of rebelling, but not in a bad way. I don’t want to hurt anyone, I don’t just take any place and start to scribble on it, I think about it much more then that." *
