I Miss Blu

In the wee hours of a late September morning in 2011, a colleague and I drove into the small city of Grottaglie, Italy, after an all-night ride from Rome. We couldn’t quite figure out where our hotel was. The city has a unique landscape: it’s surrounded by ravines, so it appears higher in elevation than it really is, and it winds around in different directions, making it hard to decipher what’s the center and what’s the edge. The first thing I remember seeing was a mural by Italian street artist Blu, as soon as we crossed into the city. Given that we were there for FAME Festival, perhaps one of the more renegade art festivals in the world at that point, spotting Blu meant we were in the right place.

It felt almost mischievous, even a little dangerous, to be driving from Rome to the south of Italy in the middle of the night after a flight from San Francisco, and for some reason, seeing a Blu piece as the sort of “x marks the spot” moment on the drive felt spot on: Blu was representative of a mischievous, vital, anarchic, punk, political moment in street art that was more bound by a lack of infrastructure than by anything else, and more driven by passion of purpose. The vibe felt like DIY meets revolution. Art should be put into daily life, not as tags, but as modern murals that spoke to a collective consciousness but also didn’t ask permission. It was righteous and, at times, really fucking right. To this day, I think that is what made street art so powerful in that window of 2000–2008; by the time I arrived in Grottaglie in 2011, Banksy was already a global icon, Shepard Fairey was a presidential artist, and Swoon was invading the Venice Biennale. I was almost there as an observer of what once was, and FAME Festival was one of the last bastions of authenticity of a movement that was slowly becoming a real estate aesthetic for badly designed condos with a boba tea shop on the ground floor.

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