Once upon a time in Madrid when exploring my new neighbourhood Malasaña, a quirky sight on a street corner stopped me. I took a picture of the amusing detail: three splashes of colour on the wall - a light pink, a yellow and a blue - at the height where one usually spots piss stains. I named the photograph Pissing pastels.
This was not the only time I saw these three pastels together, but in fact they seemed to decorate the whole of Malasaña. I spotted them on the ground, on the walls and fences, and kept photographing them. Eventually, I started using these pastels as a navigation tool: whenever I saw them, I knew I was close to home. They were not the ordinary figurative graffiti, but abstract shapes, usually rectangles, that followed the forms of the street tiling. The repetition of the same colours in the same district got me thinking: it must be a certain person or a group that paints these funny random patterns. The idea of abstract street art intrigues me as well as the way how they add up to the urban layers. These layers of history and people with different backgrounds, form a unique and rich visual world that keeps on expanding. One layer in the characteristics of Malasaña, like in Spain in general, is the Arabic influence in the architecture: if you stop on the street and look up, you will see Islamic patterns on the balcony tiles. In June 2015, six months later of the sight Pissing pastels, I took a walk. This time I had an aim: to find the new Patio Maravillas after the one on Calle Pez had been closed. My flatmate and I decided to go look for a hint of the new location by the old Patio, a squatted house that held different kinds of cultural activities run by the people of Malasaña. Standing in front of this building again, I saw the three colours that had followed me: the pink, the yellow and the blue. Although this time they were not hiding but exhibiting themselves on a huge surface: the façade of Patio Maravillas. At the same time I felt excited and confused by the fact that I had not noticed the use of these significant colours on the painted wall before, but only now. Moreover, I spotted a text: Funny random patters. Those were exactly, what I had been seeing during my stay. We also found the hint that was quite direct: the new address of Patio Maravillas was written on the wall. So on we went and once we had arrived, we asked a person working there whether he knew who had painted the mural on Calle Pez. He did not. Just when I thought my exploration had arrived to a conclusion the real research only had begun. Now I am asking: who are you? Let's collaborate. |