Behind the tag

you from? What are you doing?’ But these guys are standing there...and this is a window and it supposed to be the representation of the city and at the same time I am pretty sure that these people will disagree with you if you make a piece next to them: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ They will call the cops.

[Raw – 26, Amsterdam] As Raw affirmed in one of the interviews, ‘you can make the comparison to a dog that pisses everywhere, but then you want to be a big dog that pisses around the whole city’(Raw – 26, Amsterdam).

In fact, the wider the range of territory where the name appears, the more respected the writer and his activity will be. ‘With the city you sort of claim something. You claim your space, and the bond with the city becomes stronger’ (Edge – 26, Amsterdam).

Even though they recognize it as an illegal activity, writers feel that they have the right to paint on the walls of the city because they see it as a public space that belongs to everyone. Nevertheless, all the writers I’ve met agreed on the fact that there are some sort of unwritten rules or just common sense from which they avoid writing on monuments or old buildings in the historical centre. This brings back what has been already mentioned in the first paragraph of this section.

What a graffiti writer decides to stain suggests his personality. The space one takes shows the lifestyle of the writer. For instance, some writers push the boundaries of common sense, they paint wherever they want (which is basically the significance of graffiti); this can be a wall that has been recently painted, or a shop window. In this way the writer knows he is causing a serious discomfort and by doing it anyway, suggests a more arrogant personality.

I have some things that I don’t tag. Like private houses and monuments. I also don’t think it fits very well some how. Especially in the centre with these old houses. It doesn’t look good in these 16th century houses . I think there is a quite clear graffiti aesthetic almost. It sorts of fits in certain places and not in 57