09/11/2026
1995, Before Saturno, I was SAIZ.
This photo is from when I started painting. I’ve always lived in a small town, far from the city, and in mine there were only four of us doing graffiti. This was the first day we went to paint in Barcelona.
I went with two guys from my neighborhood and we met at the door of Game Over, the spray paint shop. Years later, talking to Kapi, one of the owners, I found out it was the first shop in the history of hip hop to sell spray paint (that was in ‘93, correct me if I’m wrong). Before that, you bought cans at the hardware store or, more often than not, you just stole them. Next to the shop there were some benches where writers would gather to show each other photos of what they’d painted. I remember it with so much love.
One of them took us to the wall, by the train tracks in Sant Andreu. Being small-town kids, we were scared of getting robbed (right across from us there were some shanties), so we put our film cameras, wallets and watches in a plastic bag and hid it in the bushes.
While we were painting, some kids on the other side of the tracks started throwing rocks at us. And we, like good small-town kids, threw them right back. Then we kept painting.
When we finished, as we turned the corner of the wall, there was a group of gitanos gathered around a burning oil drum, clapping and singing flamenco with a guitar. One of them walked straight up to us to ask what we were doing there. We thought that was it for us, but I think he saw we were just kids. He let us go and told us it was no hour for a bunch of kids to be wandering around there.
From there we went with the same guy who’d brought us to another wall, a legendary empty lot near Plaza Lesseps, and painted until late in the afternoon. Then, the train back home: an hour and twenty minutes.
To me, that was graffiti. I look at it from a distance, I miss it, and I remember it with so much love. And in a way, those days are still there in my work and in the way I paint.
