Security cameras, accusations of terrorism, guards with military experience, dogs capable of sniffing you out in the middle of the night from tens of meters away, motion and pressure sensors, surveillance rounds calculated to the millimeter and to the second… A Metal Gear Solid out of the world virtual.
The fact that reality is always stranger than fiction is always something more common than we think, especially when illegality enters a field in which the duality between satisfying your hobby and risking your life usually go hand in hand. It is not surprising that graffiti artists such as the one we have interviewed is often talked about “do a mission” when they are going to paint.
When passion drags you into danger
“I ended up doing it alone. The adrenaline of sneaking into places or doing illegal things made me separate from my usual group”.
The graffiti artist we spoke to wears 17 years painting and his passion for the art related to paint cans has ended up leading him to other less dangerous practices. Between events, workshops with teenagers and paid jobs, she has managed to monetize more than a decade behind the sprays.
“What caught my attention was painting regardless of the weather. Not thinking about whether the police will come. Make it legal and maybe spend two days painting. I only looked for that adrenaline when my body asked me to”.
For more than an hour I talk to him without getting out of my head at what point someone decides to climb a bridge with a drop of several meters just for the pleasure of stamping their art on that site. Or, maybe not so dangerous but also capable of ruining your life at the prison or monetary level, painting a train inside or outside the country with all that this can entail.
He explains to me that there are many options for painting, from trucks to parking lots, and that trains or walls are not always the most common. In the end it all seems to come down to seeing a place, a “spot”, and bite while wanting to paint there does not stop resonating in his headat which time a complex study of the situation begins to prepare “The mission”.
“The first time I sneaked into a site was in a high school. I was talking to a girl who was studying there and I painted one of the walls so she knew that she was me. It was the first time I thought “I shouldn’t be here”.
The great risks behind the world of graffiti
Today, at least in Europe, the fines for painting walls usually range between 90 and 150 dollars, and if it is in a capital like Barcelona or Madrid, the figures can go up to 2,000 dollars. If we stick to trains, although there are also usually differences between some types and others, the average usually oscillates between 2,000 and 3,000 dollars per square meter.
“If you go with more people and only one person is caught, you are going to eat your length and that of your friends, so trying to avoid being discovered is key. Graffiti and infiltration go hand in hand. You seek to be a ghost, so that they don’t see you but what you’ve done”.
The main strategy almost always comes down to having someone in control. A “pipe or a file”, as he often repeats on several occasions, who stays outside to check if the police arrive, if someone is looking too much or doing something strange. At the slightest suspicion, a phone call is enough to half stop what you’re doing and get out on your feet.
“To enter you do it from the freedom of the street, but to get out you are trapped there. Sometimes you end up jumping where you can without knowing what lies beyond”.
To avoid situations like this, there is always a prior preparation that, depending on the complexity, can last for weeks. The most skilled or experienced of the group is usually the one who sneaks in first to control. Their job is reduced to reviewing the level of security there is, where the cameras are pointing, what other problems can be found and looking for, as far as possible, an alternative way out.
“There was a garage that was very difficult to enter because there was a lot of surveillance and the drains were used. In order to get in and out as quickly as possible, you would sit on top of a skateboard and drag yourself to the station”.
The first challenge, however, is to reach the goal, with the train depots one of the most common. If you can’t do it by walking down the tracks from a station, emergency entrances to the tracks and vents are usually the next option, but they are also often the most difficult.
He tells me about falls of several meters in which they have to manage with telescopic ladders and ropes to be able to go down and go back up, all while someone watches with the corresponding danger that something happens and they leave that position. From what he explained to me, the skull and leg bone fractures number in the dozens.
studying the terrain
Once inside, despite everything that first observer can see there, from motion sensors to dog patrols, the main predator of the graffiti artist, in any case, is the security team. These also vary enormously from one place to another regardless of the price of the piece that they want to charge.
“It depends a lot on the degree of involvement of the workers. There are some who are only there to do their shift and want to go home and others who take it much more seriously, like “they won’t paint me”.
He tells me that the most surreal thing he has faced was a security guard with military experience who every night placed different mirrors in different positions trying to keep as many blind spots as possible under control: “If you got to the train depots and saw that he was there, you knew that night was going to be difficult.”.
“When you paint during the day, you often always have someone more talkative who approaches the security man, starts talking to him, asks him if he can smoke there, and distracts him while you’re doing the piece.
At night things change a lot. He has to watch the route of the guards, every time they pass, study it and paint from there. The luck is that the shifts are changing. Maybe they are a team of five security guards and you start noticing if one does not care more, if another is more lazy, if one is fatter and it will be more difficult for him to chase you… You choose which one you are going to paint”.
With the controlled patrols comes the next step, trying to get rid of all additional external agents that could endanger the mission. The camerasdespite the headaches they gave us in games, seems to be the easiest to dodge.
“You paint the cameras. Then they take about 15 days to fix it, but they are not going to be there every day waiting for someone to arrive”.
Once inside, with everything else controlled, he tells me that the second thing you should take into account beyond visibility is the noise. To avoid the noise when moving the cans, they use three options, or shake the mixture as if your life depended on it before entering, or place a magnet in the lower part of the spray that prevents the inner ball from making any sound, or go to brands that do not have the aforementioned ball. The third thing, if the situation requires it, is the smell.
apparently there is dogs They are trained to pick up the scent of paint, and once the scent is discovered, they don’t even need to see you. The solution is usually to use water based sprays whose scent seems to be much fainter, thus preventing dog patrols from detecting them. Despite being sold with an eye on workshops with children or events in closed spaces due to its reduced toxicity, the birth of the idea has a completely different origin.
“It is very tiring, both physically and mentally. Think that for half an hour to paint or one hour, at the most, maybe you have to travel by car for two hours, plus another hour and a half watching to see if that is the right day, plus escaping, leaving that town… The graffiti It doesn’t end until you get home. You don’t let your guard down until you’re in bed because anything can happen”.
He ends by explaining to me that in other foreign cities not even reaching the meeting point is the end of the road, and that in cities like Stockholm or Singapore He has contacts who have ended up being dragged out of the hotel at gunpoint after discovering them by checking cameras in spray shops where they checked the colors used and the license plates in the area.
The conversation ends up looking for more dualities between what many of us live in a Metal Gear Solid and his day-to-day life and, although he hasn’t lived it yet with sticky magazines and cigarettes to detect laser sensors, it wouldn’t be the first time he’s hidden in a box or any other hole to avoid a patrol. Once again, I will never cease to be amazed at “Reality always exceeds the fiction”.
Images | Victor Behrens, Louis Droege, Ben Elwood, Tim Mossholder, Mitchell Luo
