BFC Crazy Eye Hotel from Ge.Stijl on Vimeo.

First off, how did you guys get started?

Unga: Back in 2001 – we started when we were in high school. Before then, there wasn’t much graffiti in Israel.

Tant: Everything in Israel happens ten years later.

So what’s the scene like now?

U: It’s all happened in the last two, three years – it’s getting bigger. If you go to Tel Aviv, it’s all over the place. The entire city has tags, throw-ups and street art.

T: But where we stay in Haifa there’s nothing there, really. Old people live there. There’s nothing outside so you have nothing to do. So we just spend all our time in the studio.

Have Israelis become a bit more welcoming to street art since you started out?

U: It depends. We used to live in a poor neighbourhood and people appreciated it. When we painted outside, people would walk by and be positive about it because these areas are so neglected. But if you go to the wealthier neighbourhoods, people don’t like it so much. Angry neighbours try to chase you. Once someone threw a bucket of paint on me.

It sounds like Haifa still isn’t that up to speed on graffiti, then…

U: There’s no scene or industry in Haifa. If you want to see international artists or musicians you have to go to Tel Aviv. But we can’t stay there for more than three days, we’d want to go back to Haifa. We want Haifa people.

T: Tel Aviv makes you angry – like all the time!

U: It’s hot, people are stressed, cars honk at you – Haifa’s much more chilled. Everything’s slower. If Israel’s stuck ten years ago, Haifa’s in the eighties.

What kind of inspirations do you have?

T: American comics from the 80s, anything from Marvel or DC.

U: Robert Crumb, love him. A lot of our stuff is based on rock posters or psychedelia – anything that’s colourful or poppy.

You’re regularly called Israel’s first graffiti crew – do you feel like you’re representing your homeland?

U: We never think of Israel as our audience. We don’t label ourselves, not even as street artists or as Israelis. It’s people outside who try to label you. We just do our stuff.

Even though this is your first European show, you’ve travelled a lot for your shows. Do you have any crazy stories?

T: We did some projects in Beijing and then we went travelling in the villages – we said we were going to the top of the mountains. We walked eight hours, straight up. Then we arrived and saw a crazy, big black cloud.

U: It started storming so all four of us got inside our two-man tent and didn’t leave until the next night. In the morning, we woke up and realised we didn’t have any food or water. We thought we were stuck.

T: So we just started walking, sliding down the side of the mountain while it was still raining.

U: For a moment we thought someone would have to rescue us and it would be one of those stories about stupid travellers, but it turned out okay.

Crazy Eye Hotel, an exhibition by Broken Fingaz Crew and sponsored by BI-ARTS Grant and Cass Art, is open to the public from 6.30pm tomorrow at Shop 13, Old Truman Brewery, London E1 6QR. It runs until 29th April.

Words: Zing Tsjeng

The post BROKEN FINGAZ CREW – Crazy Eye Hotel appeared first on Wonderland.

How did you two meet, and when did you start making art together?

Eva: We met during a trip to Madrid in 1994. Franco was playing in a punk band and I was into graffiti. We kept travelling around Europe and the US for the following two years visiting museums to realize Stolen Pieces, our first work together.

Describe your London exhibition in five words.

Anonymous, untitled, colourless, odorless and tasteless.

Theft is a running theme in your work – taking people’s private photos, identities, even stealing small pieces of art. Is there anything you’d consider off-limits?

We’ve never been very creative, and stealing seemed like a good way around it. Drawing is off-limits. We never had the balls to really learn it, and probably never will.

What prompted you to start restaging performances in Second Life?

We are too young to have seen the original performances, and at the time it was hard to see the video documentation. So we thought we’d just remake them in our own way.

Is there a difference between performing for an online audience as opposed to a live crowd?

The art audience is usually not very reactive. However radical, provocative, loud, crazy or dangerous the performance, they stand there politely watching. Even if half the audience think you’re retarded, you’ll still very rarely ever hear some actual reaction, somebody who stands up to say or do something. And that’s usually when the security intervenes… On the internet, people act as they please. Most of the time this means insulting you, but hey, at least they do it openly.

So how did people online respond to No Fun (watch the video below), when you staged a suicide on Chatroulette?

Some people laughed, some were completely unmoved, some insulted the supposed corpse, some took pictures with their mobiles. At one point a guy started masturbating. So while we expected our “performance” would shock the viewer, we were the ones shocked. Maybe it turned us from authors to spectators?

No Fun from Eva and Franco Mattes aka 01.ORG on Vimeo.

When the Internet first started out, nobody could have predicted that we’d be sharing everything about ourselves online in 2012. How has your art responded to that?

This is so weird for us. In 2000 we started a project called Life Sharing that lasted three years and was exactly about sharing our life through the internet. Anyone could read and copy all the contents of our computer: texts, images, software, even our private email. We felt like being guinea pigs in this weird experiment of radical transparency. We couldn’t expect that in few years everyone would have done it, although maybe for different reasons.

What else can we expect from you both this year?

We’d like to make a piece that is invisible, that it’s impossible to view, and yet you want to see it… Is it possible?

Anonymous, Untitled, Dimensions Variable is open to the public from 10am tomorrow at Carroll/Fletcher Gallery – 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ. It runs until 18th May.

Words: Zing Tsjeng

The post MATTES – Anonymous, Untitled, Dimensions Variable appeared first on Wonderland.