NUMERO SEI - DUFFI

September 20, 2024

It has been a summer full of things, a lot of projects and a lot of work for everyone, and then also holidays. We had already interviewed Duffi in June, when it still seemed that summer did not want to begin. Now that it is practically over, TUTTI LIBERI LIBERE TUTTE starts again by sharing the peaceful answers to the questions that Anna had marked on the phone notes.

Let's start in the simplest of ways, when did you make your first tag?

It must have been in seventh or eighth grade, when I was 12 or 13. I was already doing tags with my name on my notebooks at school and then once I found this coloured spray can and in the afternoon we went around the village with some friends to write, and they are still there today! I had no idea anyway, I mean like graffiti on trains did not exist for me. The inspiration was really just using spray paint! I had also drawn some wooden panels at home at my grandparents'. Then when high school started instead after a few months we made the first crew which was called ESPO, that was an important period. First real pieces, bombing, tracksides, highways, you learn about the various sprays, the caps, the markers. Shit, the markers, there was so much marker mania at that time, we filled the school buses every day. Of course the first street beefs started too. We were having fun :) Later that year I met the Swiss guys and there I heard about trains for the first time. After a few weeks I joined IVC. A few years later, after returning from a period in England, I joined F64. The crew was in its beginnings, there were 4-5 of us in those days. Those crews have remained the same until now!

Yesterday arriving in Rome among the many scrapped pieces there was an F64 by you. You seem to me to be someone who has always liked to take trips to paint.
Yes when I could I always made my little trips to paint. I've been to Rome a couple of times. The first time I met Saor (RIP) [https://goldworld.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/0dca7980-0960-4ade-b9f5-a6f2e56e8f37-960x720.jpg] from Graff Dream and we became friends, then he also visited me.
In Bologna, on the other hand, I met MOT [https://www.facebook.com/share/1JrSJUqjPuEFjQVB/] from A2R first (when A2R didn't exist yet though, we're talking 2010-11 maybe). I went to the little record shop to buy some Clash to make a piece and the guy in the shop said ‘Ah, are you going to the jam?’, ‘what jam?’ I said. ‘There's a jam in the countryside , they're performing and painting too’. OK, I take my bike and go. When I arrive, I get assigned a spot and I find myself next to a guy all dressed up in a baggie and a jersey. We immediately became friends and we are still friends today. From that moment on, Bologna has been a point of reference. The connection with the city tightened even more when Toupé [https://www.instagram.com/p/BddOGfMjoC1/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet] and Bmor attended the art academy there, basically as soon as I could I used to go down to Bologna instead of staying in Milan. We painted a lot, with A2R and HFS.

Then I lived in Belgium for a year, where I painted with the LFLF:[ https://www.instagram.com/p/CEbBYJTCoqL/?igsh=YzBuZHR2N3Fxanl2 ], Plorvi [ https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/yocharleroi-j.jpg ], Blade, Avoid, Toni, Manks [ https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS1wfx37a4Gr9QeGX4ypwUQfBIdYFQ92qjaQA&s ] and company. It was a great group, all together and all motivated! It was 2015-2016. From Belgium I came back to Italy and lived with Nass in Milan for a year. That's when I met Vagina from Barcelona, of whom there are a few pieces in the fanza, he settled on our couch for a month cooking eggs every day!

Were you influenced stylistically by Belgium?

My goodness, yes! With the guys we did some crazy stuff that we absolutely didn't do here. Apart from the fact that I did three panels at night, we almost exclusively painted during the day.
I've always been excited about antistyle, I had already seen Bamboo [https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.berlingraffiti.de%2F2017%2F02%2Fbamboo-spair.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=36e0a405256e81cea671484c2621a0d5e5fb0ab980ebd7fe3bcfd5b36b6a990d&ipo=images] type stuff on a trip to Berlin that made me put everything into question, but then arriving in Belgium, seeing the guys do certain things, being forced to paint in 12/15 minutes with cleaners always arriving in the yard were things that we had never seen in the provinces, we had always painted in an hour and a half without any kind of problem. Back in Italy I had a very different way of approaching graffiti, both in terms of the stylistic part and the action itself.

And dream locations you haven't visited yet?

Maybe Eastern Europe for the nice old knurled panels.
With all these trips you must have a graffiti tale to tell us!
We were in the hangar doing a metro. I check under the train and see the plainclothes guys sneaking up on us. Not even time to tell the others to go away that they start shouting and chasing us. They even got into a fight with the others, like tugging and stuff, while I managed to get away. As soon as I was far enough away I started to vomit from running and from the tension. It was winter, I was wearing a hoodie and a fucking k-way, those super-light ones or maybe not even that, and I didn't know what to do because the others weren't answering the phone, but I didn't want to move because there were definitely police patrols around. So I slept in the lift of a block of flats until a guy woke me up in the morning on his way in. Some strange morning chatter and I left.

Your letter construction is often weird, the sticks are not rectangles but have more eccentric shapes, why?

It's a bit of the antistyle thing, looking for something alternative, more unusual. However, lately I'm also getting back into doing more graffiti stuff, 70s or 80s style, like in the zine the design taken from Blade's wholecar, master style! I like to do both.

Do you have any non-graffiti influences?

Yes a lot, a lot of things gas me. The avant-garde of course, tattoos, primitive African and South American stuff. Eastern European graphic art rocks. 90s cartoons.

Judging by the fly-fly-like pattern that has taken him around Europe in recent years chasing after foreign friends and styles, you wouldn't guess that Duffi is a quiet guy. Instead, he speaks so calmly that you would think the microphone on his phone had switched by accident. He takes his time to reconstruct the stories or reflect and answer our questions properly.
TLLT starts up again after the holidays, but our microphone had not mutated, we were just reflecting. See you around, we have a few trips planned between now and Christmas.