NUMERO NOVE - DOGMA

NUMERO NOVE - DOGMA

We fill our suitcases and backpacks with fanzines, someone also takes the computer to play music and someone else the camera to film this family trip of the TLLT team. We reach Dogma in his studio the night before the event at Giri Berlin. The door opens and the slender figure greets us with a warm “Good evening”. Behind his back we can see a carpenter shop. His studio stands in a side door. Fortunately, the recording has already started, because after explaining to us that that studio is also his home, Sasha asks a question that sets off a domino effect.


S: How long have you been tattooing?
D: I always get questions about time, why is time so important? I don't understand, I don't think it is. I live in the moment. It's not that I think about the next one or the one before. I could tattoo from today, yesterday or tomorrow, but I would still do it the same way, because I don't focus on creating an experience according to the number of times I do something. I simply let go the moment and see what comes out, that's when you create. When you dwell on redoing something already done you lose the rhythm, you are already a victim of yourself, you are imitating and not creating.


S: Do you live graffiti this way as well?
D: Absolutely. The only thing that held me back from doing beautiful graffiti was taking back things I had already done in the past. When I had time and space to be quiet, I did things that I liked. When you're under pressure you have a difficulty given by circumstances, especially in graffiti where you have to be worrying about not getting arrested and a thousand other things, whereas I want to be present to the world and be free. Only then you can be really creative and do things that no one has ever seen.



S: Is there an environment where you feel more comfortable?
D: I would like to say no, but unfortunately circumstances still drag me down. Building your present is a basis for peaceful living, if not you are in a cage. Freedom allowed us to get to graffiti. Then after that the ego factor came in, but there it's another matter...graffiti gets erased. Kings become 40-year-old dickheads and you look around, wondering if what you wanted to do was to become the king or just to express yourself. My creative space is abstract and empty, and it's not a matter of practice, anybody can get there at any time. I wish that for everybody. It is the moment when you are more alive than ever.


Andrea: How do you get to that space?
D: There are some people who may say Meditation, I'm on drugs. It's a tool to get directly to that point of ego loss and total freedom, where the mind is completely empty. Sometimes I get there sober with creativity, sometimes not. Maybe I shouldn't say these things. However, I don't give a shit about your opinion as you read. Now I will read you something I wrote to give you an understanding of what creativity is to me:

The day when someone will understand, everything will change in an instant and although no one expected it, the sky will change color taking on shapes that no one had imagined before. Novelty will be daily and we will never again have a chance to be bored, because the barrier that keeps us from being superior to ourselves will finally be broken through and we will live with the eyes of a child and the heart of an adult. The mind will be nothing more than a seesaw where we will awkwardly push ourselves and take flight with a single vigorous gesture, a vital push toward new ideas and new character traits toward getting closer to others by speaking ourselves. An endless, slightly rippling sea that depending on the winds redefines the currents into geometric and luminous figures, iridescent harmonies of love. 

You see, to me that's being creative. That's living in the moment, letting go of who you are.



S: Do you try to avoid repetitiveness?
D: This is a very pointed question. I think so, I had never thought about it. I actually admire those in New York who always make the same thing, because they always return to their creative space in the same place and I can't. By creating you fall back into making something ugly, it's inevitable. Whereas these guys know how to remake something beautiful every time, and I respect that. Sometimes I regret not finding beauty always in the same things. Style is a fad.



A: Do you want to convey something?
D: I have gone through billions of stages, now I am in a peaceful place threatened by those who remain of certain ideas. I don't care about anything, because the day I die I will be dead. I don't want to live forever, life is beautiful and appreciable in its fleetingness. The point is that a part of me, which is my ego (which I hate) wants to convey something. But it can be transcended. The one and only message I want to give is to live and enjoy things, not to make useless struggles and value everything. I realized that the graffiti world doesn't give me any more life drive. I don't want to be happy because people admire me, because I show how good I am or because of how many times I do it more than others. 


S: Is this the dogma?
D: This is the Dogma.



Dogma made it clear early on: he did not want to tell us his story. He says it is not the circumstances that matter, it is the realization of certain conclusions. In this interview he did not make names and told us only one story to make us understand how often graffiti made him feel more bad than good, because of externally imposed constructions and structures that generated an internal struggle in which he actually had no interests.


D: In London I was very close to the subway The last one I painted was in New York, which as a writer gave me so much and allowed me to achieve a dream I had built for myself. Anyway, I was in London to do the subway and an Italian guy who was with me named Laoch joined me. We meet in this yard I had spotted before. After several odysseys in the night and in the cold, surrounded by brightly lit skyscrapers, security boxes always on with the guards sleeping in them, we find ourselves climbing over these thousand gates with the most obnoxious barbed wire I have ever found in my life and we arrive on the tracks.

We could see the subway, but we were pointed at by a flashlight. He just couldn't stand, came out, even though I told him to wait and hide us there somewhere. Afterwards I called him, he climbed back and went back in. So we get close again, but the security guy puts the flashlight back on us. I decide not to make it and instead I wanted to do a backjump in another place 20 km from London. Whereupon Laoch says to me, "You know what? I'm going to go home and take a nice nap." I tried to manipulate and convince him, but nothing, this bastard. I, like a beast of Satan, went. I took a bus, then changed it, went very far away and found myself in the middle of nowhere in the middle of golf courses, half asleep.

I get off the bus and realize I've lost the little hat I really liked that a friend had given me. I was pissed off as it was, to make this subway that I don't give a shit about. I got in front of the train, the moon, the trees..and you know what? I left for home. I left and the next day I was like God. That was the last graffiti I did in this way. Now I go to paint, I get in front of the wall and I'm enjoying it like no tomorrow. I don't want to hear anything about all these weird issues. I'm glad I finished my career as a writer. 

The interview ends brutally and Dogma stops the recording saying he doesn't want it recorded anymore. There is not much more we can do, he is very firm and we respect him. A little stunned we thank him and say goodbye as he heads to a bar for a drink before going to Berghain. We see him again the next morning, incredibly fit, to paint the window of Giri Berlin where in the evening there would had been the launch event of his zine, the ninth of TLLT 2024.

Throughout the evening he remained locked in the bathroom welcoming without a word anyone entering, in the background a schizophrenic audio of a digital voice: it was his performance. The next day we left for Italy, while he caught a flight to New York at 8 a.m. He would spend the entire following month touring and tattooing in the States. He repainted the New York subway.

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