VENENO
We got the chance to interview Veneno, graffiti artist, activist and member of the Black Lines movement. Currently settled in Nantes, she worked in engraving side by side with the crew ASARO, a committee of revolutionary artists from Oaxaca in Mexico. A poignant international journey constantly linking artistic productions and social battles!
Many thanks to her for this wonderful cover!
| By Polka B. – Translated by Oihane.
How did you discover graffiti and what pushed you to get into it ?
Veneno: I was always drawing since I was a kid. I discovered graffiti when I was 13. I got gifted the book Kapital. When I was doing round trips to Paris to go see my family, I would see a lot of it and it fascinated me. The tool also. The spray allows you to paint big surfaces… This interested me right away. I started doing this in 2006.
You said you were influenced by Alex from MAC and Mode2 in the beginning. Why were you first interested by realism and figurative art ?
Back then, it was really the technique which I was finding impressive. It blew my mind to see things that were very realistic over such large spaces. Today I see things differently.
I try to also have a certain level of technique but it is mostly the emotions in which I have the most interest for. Gustave Doré’s engravings influenced me greatly. The importance of black in drawing, with references such as Sin City… I like this kind of universe.
Can you tell us about your three years in Mexico? Why this trip?
I left for the first time in 2016. I was with a French association to give graffiti lessons in a slum in Oaxaca de Juarez. This lasted a week.
It’s during El Dio de Los Muertos that I genuinely discovered the Mexican culture. I fell in love with it right away ! I only wanted one thing, to come back. Two years later I went back thanks to the network I had built myself. Especially with the graffiti artist YESCKA who became a very good friend of mine.
Oaxaca is very well known for its engraving workshops and art galeries. The city shelters a lot of very politically engaged artists.
Violent encounters took place between teachers and police during protests (on June 19th 2016, the police had shot teachers with lethal bullets which killed 8 people, NDLR) and a lot of artists spoke up about these acts through engravement. This had been my first encounter with the links between the arts and politics. It was at that moment that I met the members of the ASARO collective.
How did you join the crew?
They asked me to join them. It was when I started to do engravings on large surfaces.
We would come together in the workshops and create the themes we would work on with each other. This could be very local but also about the United States, the borders debates or other fights Latin America was involved in. It was genuinely interesting for me to discover all of this!
We would print our engravings in our workshops during the day and we would get together in the evening to put up massive artworks.
I was involved in it for a good while. I wasn’t even using the spray paint anymore. To be fair, I was living there thanks to my engravings’ sales.
How did your life there influence your ways around graffiti?
It completely changed my work. It’s important to know that while I was there, one of my friends I was engraving with got incarcerated. The only way for me to see him (as parlors were only accessible to family) was to negotiate with the prison’s director, the making of a fresco in the prison for El Dio de Los Muertos.
He approved. Thus, I found myself there, woman alone in a men’s prison, during a day where visits were forbidden, painting on the inside and surprising my friend who had been imprisoned for a year and a half. As time went by, I became friends with a couple prisoners who also did engravings.
Together, we built Proyecto Vándalo. I was going there every Thursday and after several months, we got to make more or less 80 artworks. I had posted a crowdfunding to pay for all of the supplies. Everything was made in jail, even the frames! We even organised exhibitions in the prison then I got everything out to put on an exhibition in Oaxaca and in Mexico City.
All of that to say that this was my first encounter with the prison environment. Ever since, it’s been very present in my work. When I get a call from another country, it’s something that I can do. Lessons on engraving or graffiti in the prisons. This brought me to Peru, in Dominican Republic, on Saint Lucie’s Island…
You went back to Nantes in 2020. How did you meet the members of the Black Lines movement?
I went back and had an overwhelming will to do graffiti again ! Engravings are alright but I always loved the monumental. Back in France, I got lucky enough to instantly link up with Black Lines. They connected art making and social… exactly what I was interested in.
The first encounter with Itvan Kebadian, the collective’s founder, was in Nantes. We ended up painting on the same wall coincidentally, he then invited me to the next Black Lines’ meeting in Paris. I liked the concept straight away. It was a little bit the French version of what I had lived in Mexico !
Could you explain the different elements of the BL movement?
They are artists helping the struggles. In the front of the procession, the front line in an artistic version. There is a news theme chosen by our collective’s core members as well as a particular wall.
Then, we create an event on social media. The event is open to every artist willing to express themselves on the topic, all techniques are possible, only in black and white. It is the best way to have an esthetic unity on the wall and the impact is even more striking. Plus, it’s way cheaper for everybody. So far, more than 300 artists have contributed to it.
You are pretty well known for your banners. How did you find this idea? Why chose this medium to work with?
We wanted to create movable frescos to have our messages to be visible during protests and to make them accessibility to a larger amount of people. If we add them all up we might have made over a hundred Itvanand myself !
Sometimes we have other artists as our guests to make banners, then we work on giving them out to groups of protesters on the day of.
Some protesters helped us bring our banners on the front line and it has stayed that way ever since. It all relies on a very precise organisation.
After the realisation, we wrap them up in gift wrapper and ship them to one person who gives them to someone else. We make sure that the journey can’t be tracked back to us. Our place is limited to the art.
Isn’t it frustrating to work on them so much for them to possibly get confiscated during protests?
It is ! We put our whole heart and spend a lot of time into it. It’s important to know that get teared away with extreme violence. A lot of protesters were harmed by the police in order to protect the Black Lines banners. The police often threatens the ones holding them before the protest even starts.
We even see a picture of police posing with its « catch » !
Clearly ! This insane picture that has been sent to us… For them it’s a war catch, just like hooligans who managed to catch the other team’s flag. Out of a hundred, I would say they took half of them. Nonetheless, the more they took, the more we would make ! And at the end of the day, the photographers immortalized out messages forever. These images are central. We genuinely need them, it’s the heart of what we do.
Are you worried by the legal authorities when it comes to your art, and if you are, how so?
We made the decision to not hide and to own up. We play out role as artists, it’s our vision on things. The intimidations we face exist under a couple of ways. Police often shows up when we are painting. We ended up in the police station a couple of time even though they were walls which are legal to paint on. This happened to us 3 years ago when we had painted a fresco about Palestine. 30 cops showed up to stop us (we were 5 artists). And obviously we know for sure that the General Informants¹ are monitoring us. (¹French organisation belonging to the police informing the government of possible threats).
Even though we could say that these are just « drawings ». This means that what you do bothers… And that you have a real impact !
That is true. And another sign would be that we are very often shadow banned on our social medias. When the algorithm finds something « bothersome », our posts become visible only by our followers for a little while. Thus, we have to be smart.
Can you explain the specifics of your work around the duality? How did you help it evolve?
I often am between softness and hardness. Poetry and real life. I want to bring out emotion from a single glance. Just like the hooded lovers or the characters wearing a mask that I make for example. I often start with the eyes so that I can put all the emotion required in them. I try to make my masked couples travel around the world. I painted some in Togo, on the Réunion Island, in a prison in Mexico, as well as in France (several in Paris and some others in Rennes).
What is it that you want to do next?
Continue to develop my personal projects. My passion is also my job. This is why I travel so much. To paint walls, or to work in the prisons. Black Lines takes the other half of my time. And I hold as much importance towards one or the other !
Thank you for the interview! Could you tell us a song that you enjoy listening to at the moment?
Horachek – « Plus jamais ça » (I made the music video)