NUMERO OTTO - LIFE

We called Life a few days after interviewing Jeris, towards the end of August. He had just got back from Berlin. He met some nice people and did some good action. So he tells us:

I just painted the Berlin metro, it was nice. They explained to me more or less how to do it: from the street you go to the bushes, from the bushes you find a hole in the net, best hole in the net ever. They were doing tests with the new metro, the one that isn't in circulation yet, so it was moving a bit randomly there in front. There was an open window, but it was super high up, luckily there was a fire hydrant which I climbed over a bit, got to the window, from the window I jumped onto the roof of the metro, then got down and chose the model, like at the market. I did the cool one, knurled. I didn't take a picture because the driver arrived when I finished, but the internet found it anyway.

 However, he is not very satisfied and tells us that for various reasons it was also very stressful. Actually, one might expect that judging from his fanzine.

So, can you explain the choice of cover? Why this bucolic space?

It's the view I have from the station platform closest to the farm where I lived for a while, in inner Switzerland. It's a photo I took when I was on my way to photograph some graffiti, that Universal you see inside the fanzine. That is the context in which I paint those trains, that is my urban context and the cows are my homies. I did a video recently where you see the trains and you only hear the cowbells, nothing else, it's magic.

Why Life? I've been compulsively changing names for a long time, it's only been a year since I've kept a more or less recognisable one, although I still like to write different names. Life comes from a video game, they're very important to me, they're the fifth column of hip-hop. Life comes from a video game from 2021 called Cruelty Squad. It's made by Ville Kallio, an artist, and it blew the minds of both artists who were already following him and gamers who don't give a shit about art. It is violent in all aspects, in colour, sound and content. Long-term exposure to this game destabilises you. After a couple of hours playing it in the countryside, so a completely different environment, as we said before, I had this very strong contrast and it completely alienated me.

Have you ever played Getting Up?
No, and nothing related to graffiti, except GTA San Andreas where graffiti is the most boring activity. I really like doing exploration in video games, especially in the slightly old ones, Halo, Half Life, Portal, Doom (the old one) where you can go outside the confines of the map and get to places you shouldn't be and where you start seeing glitches that shouldn't be there. There's a lot of ambient in my style of play, it's liminal. I can send you screenshots of places I've been ahahahah.

I've also often dreamt of these places, like yards in the woods or perfect grey concrete tracksides and I wake up feeling great. And they are all landscapes that I later find in Switzerland. I've been thinking a lot about what I like to do in graffiti and this theme of solo exploration of places is cool. I like painting in farms much more than in a city like Berlin which is super-saturated and super-noisy. In fact, I've really enjoyed Spair's exploration books that go around and paint abandoned places around the city. Talking with Atfa24 he called them in a way I really like: graffiti in a bottle, and I really like both finding them and making them, they are like video game easter eggs but in the real world.

But people in Berlin paint because a lot of people see it, don't you find it somewhat contradictory like this? Graffiti is meant to watch ‘my name go by’, while this way it's as if you only paint for cows, it's a different way!

Yes, in a way it is. I like to paint where I like to paint, I choose my spots carefully, not only because I want to but also because I can't. If you tell me to do a shutter I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to occupy the space, instead if I walk in the water tunnels I think ‘Woo, cool’. I like to take my space, but also my time, so very often I paint slowly. Sometimes I would also like to be able to make a shutter, but as I see them very little, I don't get the problem and I don't get as much inspiration anyway.


It also depends on what you looked at growing up! Where did you look at graffiti in the beginning? What did you like and what inspired you?

I am very sad about what I consumed in the beginning. In Bucharest it was very nice, the graffiti on the red bricks, but then when I arrived in Ticino I was using the internet very badly and I was following those nasty pages on Instagram where they do graffiti with 15 million likes all varnished and I was trying to do that stuff. If I had found something else now I'd probably be a better styler, I regret having consumed so much shit, but I didn't have any partners who painted and I didn't know anyone in general!
Then Cacca, who is now my crew mate, was the first one I met and the first one to tell me ‘great, keep going!’, there was a bit of a turning point there. I also started going out a bit more, I started seeing a lot of PML and MTG stuff, which were the first real contacts from which the real study of my style then started, even distancing myself from that stuff.

You now have several very original styles, some of which are very old school. What is your relationship with it?



I love to see this stuff and I don't see it much any more, apart from being the first ones I saw as a kid in Bucharest, so I try to do it from time to time. Just as in art you study the great classics, I study graffiti from 2000. I hope you can still see that it is a reinterpretation and not a photocopy. When I moved to Ticino, the first pieces I saw were by Pano TRA (Trip Acrilica) and by Siero from the late 90s/early 2000s, which I never saw anywhere else after that. I only found out later that Pano was my cousin and I went crazy. He still draws, he does some stylish stuff, even canvases.

Speaking of style, the fanzine starts off quite curiously with an Enigma ambigram, perhaps the first graffiti ambigram?
Not the first, there was a guy who wrote Space in Switzerland who had already done one and it always stuck in my head.
And what is your relationship with puppets?

Puppets are cool and hard to do, video games, cartoons... anyway I like smiling faces, I want my piece to smile because it's happy. Even my gang sign, which is an 87, is actually a smiling face when turned. This will comes from a guy from my village who used to cut the grass for a friend of my grandmother's, Fausto, who I later found out that he used to drink a lot, thus explaining the drawings he did. I was obsessed with scorpions in primary school and this guy was like, ‘I draw too!’, so he went to the van and pulled out these drawings with rather childish puppets with smiling faces, really silly stuff. I was disappointed because that day I wanted scorpions and I was expecting something else, but instead he says ‘this one is smiling because... he's happy : )’. This thing has remained stuck in my brain! Fausto I still see him around, I asked him to show me the drawings again but he drinks a lot and never remembers. At the same time, however, the inspiration for my drawings is very aggressive, if I think back to the Life video game.
Something you want to leave for posterity, for someone reading this interview in 2034?
I don't know, I'm not good at improvisation, if I was good at improvisation I would have done the shutters!
Life seems pleased with the comparison of his style with Happy Hardcore, happy, bright colours contrasting with metal shapes. He adds the concept of the biomechanical, what is soft and sharp at the same time. It all evokes a sense of contradiction, of paradox, but what else could we expect from someone who crews with bovines? : )