Legal graffiti walls in Barcelona: where to paint today

Marc Garcia
It has been five years, three months and a few days since this project began. I think it is worth looking back, because there are three phases, three platforms with the same philosophy but a different goal. There is Persianes Lliures, a phase my brother and I lived through and which I think was the most fun, because we were fighting the city council and had nothing to lose and nothing to gain: we did it because we felt like it and because we wanted to do something different. Then, with Murs Lliures, we started negotiating with Barcelona City Council, and as in any negotiation you have to give ground and be more formal: it was far more bureaucratic and took many more years of working out how to move forward. And finally we get to Wallspot, which is a change of paradigm: artists no longer request permission on the website, what they do is make a booking.

Pau García
My brother gave me two and a half weeks' notice and told me I had to explain the story behind all this. I have called it The Backstage Story of Wallspot. I started painting graffiti because the internet at my house was very slow: while I was bored, I would open Paint and start drawing. My name is Pau García Sánchez and I decided to take «Chez», the last bit; it wasn't very original. I must have been thirteen when I started taking it to the street. I told my parents I was going skating, and they were suspicious, because it was five in the morning; but I told them there were no cars at that hour.

I kept improving: I explored Barcelona, abandoned factories, outlying neighbourhoods, things that made me understand the city in a very different way. Even 22@, now the Design Museum. What happened to us in Barcelona was that we had to go out to the dry riverbeds, to Sant Boi, to Sant Just, and that was an enormous trek with the spray cans and the paint; and in the end we often wound up painting in our own neighbourhood, at night, in a far more illegal way.

There was a reality: at that time Joan Clos was in charge, and he brought in several policies, one of which was designed specifically for the graffiti world: the bylaw of measures to promote and guarantee civic coexistence in Barcelona's public space, which people know as the civic bylaw. The police enforced it very quickly: within six months, the spaces that had been used freely by Barcelona's various artistic collectives since the late nineties became illegal. Fines ran from 600 to 3,000 euros for painting in those spaces. I was working scooping ice cream at the Häagen-Dazs in Diagonal Mar on a very small wage to be able to pay the fines.

And my brother said to me: «Pau, I have an idea. Why don't you use your knowledge of the graffiti world and we set up a business so you can pay your fines?» He had just moved to Horta-Guinardó and he makes friends very fast: he was friends with the mechanic, the butcher, the baker. And suddenly people in the neighbourhood were saying: why don't you paint our shutters? We started painting shutters, and people in the neighbourhood looked at them more and more and appreciated them. We didn't call it graffiti, because it was a commission, a very different kind of painted work.

And that is when Persianes Lliures appeared. It was very strange, because we found ourselves painting in the street in Barcelona quite calmly, because we had the shopkeepers' permission; and suddenly we thought: what we are doing is already what we used to do out in the riverbeds, but in the city. We started looking at the bylaw and it turned out there was a kind of legal gap: it wasn't very clearly defined where a public façade or public space began and where private space began. And we said: if this isn't defined, maybe we can open it up to everyone. We went all round the neighbourhood, door by door, telling shopkeepers: «look, wouldn't you like an artist to come and paint your shutter?» And we got 22 shutters in Horta-Guinardó; the day of the opening was like a neighbourhood festival in Horta.

There was an important moment, which was separating from the project so the legal side could move forward. We set ourselves two things: to paint a legal project together and then to paint the most illegal thing possible. We did the first mural on the Tres Xemeneies wall, and then came the illegal part; but since he was already part of a legal institution, I had to take him out of the country: we went to Slovenia to paint trains.

Roger Pous
With Murs Lliures, after making friends through the shutters and shaking up the whole scene, we decided to go back to campaigning for walls, which had always been a demand of the graffiti movement. We weren't inventing anything; the difference is that we don't paint. In other cities there were crews who got hold of a wall and used it themselves. Since we didn't want to paint, we wanted to open the walls to everyone: graffiti writers, mural painters, designers, painters who had never painted a wall. And we didn't want to require any standard of quality or any track record.

At first that made the graffiti world somewhat wary; and on the council's side they saw us as the graffiti writers. We had the worst of both. At the first meeting with Urban Landscape, you could feel the tension before anyone had spoken. I'm a sociologist and I had a whole set of worked-up citations about the benefits of art in the city, of public participation in building neighbourhood life… and the first thing they say to me is: «yes, but graffiti isn't art». We spent almost the whole meeting arguing about what was art and what wasn't.

They didn't take us seriously until we knocked on other doors. And that was when we got a meeting with Xavier Trias, who was running for mayor. We invited him to meet us and ten graffiti writers in a bar in Gràcia; he turned up in a suit because he had a meeting with the jewellers' guild afterwards. The line of his that stayed with me was: «the problem with Barcelona's streets isn't graffiti, it's dog mess». We took it with a pinch of salt, because politicians usually don't keep their promises; but luckily he became mayor and they remembered us.

We were passed on to Carles Agustí, who handled associations, and we put the whole project to him: we wanted a wall in every neighbourhood so legal graffiti could happen and the more vandal kind would decrease. And he brought us down to earth fast: «we can try one wall, and there are some grants which, if you get them, are about 1,000 euros». Then he referred us to Sants-Montjuïc, to councillor Sergi Sarri; once we had convinced him, we had to convince the district's technical staff, and then the administrators. Sometimes an administrator has more power than a mayor: they handled the permits, which required a sketch of the work and took weeks or months, while we were proposing an instant permit using new technology.

We had the council side covered, but that wasn't enough: the project had to have a solid social base. We had to convince residents, residents' associations, local organisations, schools… so that the neighbourhood would make these spaces its own. And finally, after those thousand meetings, we got the first wall, the one at Tres Xemeneies: it was only one wall, but it was a legendary one. Then we moved on to Sant Martí, where there is much more space, and they gave us walls far more quickly. The message I wanted to give is that it is that social side that gives the project a solid foundation.

Marc Garcia
Meetings, meetings and meetings. Roger and I did, I don't know, 300 or 400 meetings in a year, repeating them over and over, because we would come out of a meeting with no idea what had happened. And in the end you get things done by being persistent.

Míriam
I want to talk about Kant. Kant is the philosopher of universality: he spent his whole life trying to establish what was universal in human beings. But the concept of beauty resisted him: can a universal concept of beauty really exist? We all have an inclination to appreciate beauty, but it is a subjective inclination. So Kant says that no concept of beauty can ever be universal: what is universal is our tendency to be able to appreciate beauty.

And what does that have to do with urban art? Well, Murs Lliures starts from one basic idea: universality. Faced with an extremely severe political restriction on the uses of public space, it was necessary to put forward a forceful alternative that would guarantee universal access to Barcelona's walls, so as to give an outlet to all the artistic talent bottled up in the city, and to do it without imposing any kind of artistic discrimination. Because on what criterion does someone make one artistic choice over another? Kant would say on an individual, subjective criterion. Murs Lliures turns away from that individualism to give a voice to a whole artistic community: it sets out to widen horizons rather than narrow them.

This universality was viewed with deep suspicion by Barcelona City Council, and with even greater mistrust by the purist end of the graffiti scene. But with every wind blowing against it, the project went ahead, consolidated and went further. And that is when, in October 2016, Wallspot was born, an international community bringing together artists, urban art photographers and cultural managers. It is currently present in 14 countries, manages 64 spaces, has more than 3,400 registered artists and more than 4,800 artistic interventions made on those walls.

Wallspot would never have been possible without Persianes Lliures or Murs Lliures, that is, without the years of chipping away. But we are now at a different point: after five years, and having proved the project's legitimacy and necessity, it is time to take a qualitative step forward, and that step means promoting and professionalising the platform's artists and photographers, without whom none of this would make any sense.

Abridged version: direct quotes are kept; repetitions, overlapping speech and passages unrelated to the project are left out.