In most cases, the result of the graffiti is secondary. They favor anonymity, lead a double life and compete among themselves in an urban game that revolves around dodging security systems. It is a closed group that generally avoids media attention.
#SPRAY PAINNT PERSON ON TRAIN TRACKS FREE#
The others prefer not to speak too much.Īccording to the National Police and the Catalan regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, around a thousand Spaniards dedicate their free time to sneaking into rail and Metro facilities to spray paint train carriages. The other men are between 20 and 25 one of them is a student. He is recently divorced, he says, and no one is waiting for him at home. There is also a 40-year-old man in the group, who confesses to having “got hooked” again after more than 10 years without doing it. Graffiti artists come from all kinds of backgrounds: marginalized, middle class and wealthy He has traveled halfway around the world to spray trains and has only recently returned home after spending three months in and out of jail in New York for spraypainting a number of wagons in the city. The 37-year-old has two children and works as a painter during the day. He is one of the most respected graffiti artists in the country with 25 years of experience behind him. The person talking goes by the name of Jabato. “There are cameras everywhere, it’s deep inside and swarming with guards.” The old carriage is located inside a facility at the rail junction belonging to Barcelona Metropolitan Transport (TMB), the main public transport operator in Catalonia.
“It’s a top model train,” says one as he unravels the rope and ties a number of knots in it. They are graffiti artists – or “writers” as they call themselves – and their goal tonight is to risk their lives painting an old Metro carriage that was built in 1926 and taken out of circulation 30 years ago.
The smoke from their cigarettes mixes with the fog from the cold air as they talk about gaps to slip through, radial saws and the police above the hum of the distant highway traffic. They are wearing sweat pants, dark clothes and trekking boots. In a parking lot near the Torras I Bages Metro station, five men between the ages of 20 and 40 take a crowbar and a 20-meter-long rope from the boot of their BMW. I took the photo at the station I commute from, the platforms were raised a couple of years ago to 550 mm (EU standard) above the rails from the older 250 mm common older Italian construction.It is Friday night in the suburbs of Barcelona. Italy gets a lot of hours of sunlight and obviously has quite the extensive rail network with significant usage for reasons like tourism traffic, fire hazards, heat, humidity and more the railways already have a bigger stress in the hotter months, I guess this measure is a proven way to reduce a specific risk factor that can cause disruption and compound with other problems. I don't know anything about other components or specific paints though. The environmental concerns on titanium dioxide are increasing but it looks like the most pressing matter for toxicity are free nano-scale airborne particles (like many small particles they can damage the lungs), dissolved particles in water and soils seem to pose a small or negligible threat. Well most white paints uses titanium dioxide as a pigment and it's pretty much everywhere already.
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