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Interview with Jerry Batista

Jerry Batista painting - street art graffiti sao paulo brazil by street art paris IMG_2102 Jerry freehands a character onto the wall, with beading dividing the wall into two tones, for his ZAT residency installation.

Jerry Batista comes from Grajaú in São Paulo’s Zona Sul district and co-runs the A7MA gallery in the city’s Vila Madalena neighbourhood with a group of artists and screen printers whom he has grown up alongside in the city’s graffiti-street art and music scenes. Here is an interview with Jerry made in Grajaú, accompanied by images of a mural he has painted here in Paris’ main … Read

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Lek & Sowat’s Mausolée film launch

Mausolee Paris exhibition presented by Sowat and Lek of the Da Mental Vaporz crew Paris Street Art Photo: copyright 2012 Demian Smith

In August 2010 Sowat & Lek, from France’s DMV crew organised forty French artists to paint out the inside of an abandoned 430,000 square foot supermarket in North Paris. For a year, an illegal artistic residency took place, documented by photo and film and by collecting detritus from the huge squatted complex which has been brought together in this new exhibition in Paris’ 13th arrondissement.

Lek & Sowat tell us that what remains of the site close to Parc de Villette is “a temple dedicated to … Read

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Interview with C215 aka Christian Guemy

C215 Paris Vitry-sur-Seine Street Art Photo: copyright 2012

Tell us a little about your artistic background and how you go into street art.

I haven’t had a formal artistic education, but my natural mother drew and left me her materials after she died at the age of 18. My grandmother drove me to reuse her materials and I would draw every Sunday at her place. This was when I was six, and I also used to draw a lot at school for fun – things like comics for the school journal and caricatures of … Read