London Transport says it costs £10 million a year to clean off the inscriptions left by Drax and his ilk. The signs of the struggle are the shadowy dark grey palimpsests you can discern on many railway carriages, remnants of an epic conflict hidden from view, like scars on a whale’s flanks from a struggle with a giant squid. Since tagging began on the New York subway in the 1970s there has been a running battle in rail transport systems across the globe between the spray-paint of the night-artists and the chemical detergents and anti-graffiti gels employed by transport authorities. That is, if London Transport’s maintenance crews don’t get there first and clean off the taggers’ work of the night before. Carriages on the Underground are also liable to become exhibits in this city-wide display. Some buildings have been entirely wrapped in words, like an installation by the Christos. The lettering is so elaborate it is hard to read, forming polychromatic scrolls that stretch across walls and bridges. Passengers on the Hammersmith and City line, or on the Great Western or Thames services that run in and out of the mainline station, are treated to a permanent retrospective of modern graffito art in a vast open-air gallery.ĭrax-and Fume, Teach, Bawd, Zonk and a dozen others-have inscribed their tags, monosyllabic noms de guerre, on the underside of the Westway in letters taller than a person. This is the Berlin wall of European graffiti culture. One of the taggers’ favoured haunts is the great web of sidings and railway buildings under the Westway near Paddington. He is the doyen of British taggers, the graffitists who cheer up-or deface, depending on your point of view-the yards and rolling stock of the London Underground system. But the artists that BA commissions might do worse than seek some hints on technique from this past master of quick-fire spray-can calligraphy. Source: Lockon Aviationĭrax now claims to have given up tagging-as its practitioners call it-at least in the United Kingdom, where it is illegal. Injection, Vol.From top: Water Dreaming / Ngapa Jukurrpa by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Australia Waves and Cranes by Matazo Kayana, Japan Blue Poole by Sally Tuffin. Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink by Stefan Zweig, read by Marcel Kruegerįlâneuse - Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin, read by Ellie Broughton The Sparrow Home project: Nonthaburi, Thailand The graphic journalism of Drawing the Times The Land of Maybe: Faroe Islands – A photo essay by Mitch Karunaratne “He told me proudly that he would never give up building dhows: “It’s our heritage.” But Ahmed lamented the fact that there wasn’t much local interest in what he was working hard to retain: a piece of the city’s history.” The dhow builder of Dubai: United Arab Emirates by Sonia Filinto Were the skeleton beams that remained cinder, or just blackened from rain and rot?” The house was burnt out and decaying, with great cavernous holes ripped out of the roof. “I walked by a house on Demesne Road, a huge home from the suburb’s days of glory. Countries and continents expand into long lines of landscape, extend their tentacles into continents, but an island ends at its shores and cliffs.” “Islands are a place in the mind, a floating piece of grit on the retina, a shape seen in its entirety. Islanded: Inis Oírr, Ireland by Sinéad Gleeson And yet I also knew that borders can be erased, or shifted.” As if this was, and always would be, the dividing line between here and there. “These borders, especially the ones with fences and checkpoints and guards, always seemed so final. But this place must also have felt profoundly disorientating, with wide empty spaces and even emptier days, suspended between an abandoned past and an unknown future.” “Perhaps the quiet order would have felt like a release from the fear and chaos of being confined for weeks on an infected ship. Quarantine: Melbourne, Australia by Louise Slocombe Where I live in a confusion of dreams and reality.” Where I fly over balconies and church-cluttered hills. A place where I fall asleep and streets are fluid. “And yet despite having spent so much time in this place, for me, Tbilisi will always be an imaginary city. As the minutes pass, the glow diffuses into a transparent citrus wash that melts into the backdrop of barely-there blue the sun is ready to slide above the skyline.”įarewell, for you are changing: Tbilisi, Georgia by Alice Maddicott “Inside the city wall the stark buildings huddle in the dawn. “Forlorn bus shelters dot both sides of the road, and the occasional bench appears, unceremoniously placed upon patches of yellowing lawn, between the bleakness of the road and the weather-worn fences surrounding the properties.”Ĭoming to Cáceres: Extremadura, Spain by Linda Ketchum Treasure Island: San Francisco, USA by Natalye Childress
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