well done - a profile of Mussolini wearing a helmet. I was maybe something like eleven or twelve and I asked my father why people did that, why did people paint directly on the wall, why they didn’t use posters - I knew posters but this I had never seen before. My dad answered it was propaganda, and that the fascists did it. During the Second World War, fascists did all their propaganda using stencils and they did it all with paint soaked rollers, as spray paint didn’t exist back then. When I enrolled in the Beaux Arts in Paris in 1971, I met an American guy named Larry Wolhandler. Once we became friends, he convinced me that I should come visit him in New York during the holidays, and really stressed that it would be a great experience for me. I knew the place only by name, but once he’d persuaded me to go, I started working and saving money to pay for the trip in July and August 1971. I stayed a month at his parents place in New York and there I discovered the first graffiti on the walls of the Village. There was already graffiti over there and I remember the sheer shock of that moment. And I asked Larry “But what is it?
Why do people put signatures like these in the subway?” I was a bit shocked as I thought it was vandalism, I didn’t understand at all why people put their names like that in New York’s subway. Larry replied ‘I don’t know, there’s some people who do that but I don’t know why.” He thought it was aggressive - he didn’t really like it. So it kind of embedded itself in my memory and when I started doing graffiti in 1981, it all came flooding back. I had always wanted to do graffiti after this American experience. I knew I wanted to; it had stayed in my mind for ten years. I wouldn’t stop talking about it. So it’s 1981 and I’m doing my architecture degree on ‘Fields of Adventure’. Fields of Adventure are a basically well thought out playgrounds – free spaces in every town where children can come after school to play under the surveillance of a volunteer adult. There is a place like that in each town where children can go play. So as I was working out at one for my studies, I noticed some kids who were stealing paint and brushes from a nearby shop and they were painting a little house in