Tag Archives: graffiti

Reading Paris

Introduced as an attempt at “catching the graffiti twinkle of Paris”, this is the latest publication from New Utopia Press. Documenting a short trip made by Potiks to the French capital Lire Paris is a tourist’s-eye-view of the city captured between stops at the many boulangeries and cafés to be found there. Potiks takes on the role of a self described flâneur; observing and soaking up the atmosphere of Paris. Or, more specifically its famous graffiti culture. 

Continue reading

Keepin’ it Offline

Fade is a new magazine produced by Backyard Parking, a self described ‘street culture’ publisher based in Milan. This initial issue, in Italian with an English translation, revolves around a single writer, Rised, and their personal ‘metro war’. Now, before going into its content it’s worth mentioning just how nicely produced this publication is; the magazine feels quality, with nicely sized images, and well edited content. The first half contains a sort of informal interview interspersed with various photographs of trains alongside associated actions and paraphernalia. Meanwhile the rest of the magazine is given over to trains from Italy and beyond that have been given a fresh coat of paint by the artist in question.

Continue reading

New Kassel Graff

Located in the German federal state of Hesse, you could probably be forgiven for not having heard of the modest town of Kassel (although regular readers of Graffiti Review may recall the region from previous posts). ASAP Legends is a bit of a novelty in that it unashamedly covers newcomers to the streets of Kassel. Now, my immediate question on picking this magazine up was “is this just a load of toys?” However the magazine is built around a novel concept that unites newcomers to graffiti with old hands who are merely new to their adopted town. The publication is structured as a series of interviews with individual writers about their experience of the graffiti scene in Kassel. The result is a fairly text heavy publication, all in German, accompanied by a cool variety of styles and surfaces.

Continue reading

Is 52 weeks enough? Unsettling archaeology with graffiti recording

 By Dr Alex Hale


‘The archaeologist’s job is not to discover officially (and tell) the stories of the past. Rather, the goal of archaeology is to open people’s minds and disrupt received perceptions of society, politics, places, peoples and material culture.’

Doug Bailey 2017.

Introduction

In 2015 an urban wall was photographed every week for 52 weeks. This act of recording aimed to capture the changing temporal nature of a city location and disrupt traditional archaeological timeframes. Graffiti sprayed on the wall came and went and appeared to lead to a destructive act of gentrification, driven in part by the ‘broken window’ theory. The unacknowledged driver of this cataclysmic event was not the graffiti but was in fact the urban waste disposal system, which left wheelie bins over flowing with rubbish adjacent to the wall. Through disrupted archaeological practice, this contribution explores creative urban spaces and hegemonic gentrification agendas. The project considers how the archaeological imagination (Gamble 2008, Shanks 2012) can be turned to unheard voices from across the graffiti world to ‘excavate’ urban change. It uses techniques such as repeat photography to unsettle traditional archaeological tropes of recording, in order to engage and consider the temporality of graffiti. By going beyond traditional archaeological methods it tests approaches that engage with unsettling material culture (modern graffiti) and sustains the need for disrupted approaches within the archaeologies of the contemporary past. 

Continue reading

Gossenpost Interview

Gossenpost 2

Not too long ago the second instalment of Gossenpost was released! The focus of the magazine remains on the margins of aesthetically acceptable graffiti with a load of grimy tags, but this time round it has a more specific focus around markers. The issue kicks off with tippex scribbles, followed by marks left with crayons, and a third section of juicy blammers. Alongside these three main sections are special chapters on individual taggers. Even more so than in the previous issue the pictures are compartmentalised and ordered by colour, surface, style and location. In fact this issue came about as an overflow of the first, containing some of the cool handstyles from around Frankfurt. Aside from being a glorious celebration of ‘the tag’ Gossenpost is original in its approach to displaying graffiti. To understand the concept behind it a bit more I asked the magazine’s editor how it came about.

Continue reading

Illicit Activity

Podpolie

Belarus is the European anomaly that the rest of the continent views as its ‘last dictatorship’. Although it’s recently been in the news most people, including myself, know little about this country and its culture. So it’s interesting to come across a new magazine that attempts to remedy this. Podpolie, which roughly translates as ‘illicit activity’, is the first and only publication to focus on the scene in this far-flung part of Eastern Europe.

Continue reading

A ‘New Dawn’?

The Sane magazine Tokyo

On a recent trip to Japan a friend brought back a copy of Sane magazine. Based in Tokyo it’s apparently one of only three graff mags from the country. It begins with an introduction explaining the effects graffiti can have on an individual level which boils down to a hard lesson in the value of “effort and persistence. It nurtures the ability to see the core of things and the ways of society which we are not taught at school.” However the aim of Sane isn’t to delve into “the possibility of graffiti itself or its essentiality” but, on a more aesthetic level, to display great works of art. In fact the increasing popularity of large scale murals is described as a ‘new dawn’ awaiting graffiti.

Continue reading

The Law of the Street

Writing Hessisch 3

The third issue of Writing Hessisch magazine has recently been released and this latest addition is as good as ever. Once again the format has been tweaked slightly so that the magazine returns to a similar layout as in Issue 1. The work of several individual writers is presented over short sections while in-between the atmospheric ‘Yellow Light’ essays make a comeback. All this is followed with a fascinating look at abstract-graffiti, and then finally the magazine ends with a bit of urban field-archeology.

Continue reading

100% Straße

Gossenpost Nr.1

Although tagging is generally seen as the ugly face of graff, both by those outside and sometimes even within the graffiti subculture, it’s essentially graffiti in its purest form. Unfortunately there’s not too many magazines that focus purely on tags, street bombing, and filthy walls. So it’s really good to see a new mag out that unapologetically presents this sort of grime. This is the first issue of Gossenpost or to give its translation; ‘the Gutter Paper’.

Continue reading

Graffiti Marginalia

Bern: International Playground is a quirky new zine from Switzerland. One way to describe it is as an almost scientific catalogue showing samples of graffiti found in a particular environment. The photographic survey presented in this format is the result of more than a decade of research into vandalism occurring on Bern’s S-Bahn trains. From the start, the empty frontcover subtly evokes the concept within as the zine concentrates on the often overlooked margins.

Continue reading