Small scratches on grass

by Annalisa Audino

Frontiers of the art are endless, as the forms in which an artist can express himself and communicate his own message and his own talent. Often however the art is also very discussed, especially in some forms and expressions, particularly strange, scandalous or unrespectful of the environment and of the society. Among these there is surely graffiti art: diffused social, cultural and artistic demonstration in the whole planet, is based on the expression of his creativeness through interventions on the fabric urban public and privacy. The phenomenon, remembering the mural painting (it has often approached to it), in reality it primarily foresees writings and not draws, usually the name of the artist or meaningful sentences that become messages. Just because performed on walls, trains or objects and public and private buildings, it often comes in partnership to actions of vandalism: the use of varnishes and sprays, are not certain to greet for the guardianship of the environment besides.

But we can't admit that sometimes graffiti are real works of art.

Strucked by numerous polemics and intented to find a new expressive form, in the last times some artists to the world of the street art and endowed with a particular sensibility toward the thematic environmental have conceived a new way to make graffiti that is to say the Echo-graffiti or, as someone call it, the Organic Art. The artists try to focus the attention on the environment, both as it regards the messages of the works themselves, that as it regards the composition.

Among the streets more known and original artists there are Ann Garforth and Eleanor Stevens, called the duo El & Abe. About two years ago the two artists started to make Mossenger (fusion of moss and messenger), that is graffiti made of musk that, if positioned in correct levels of damp and light, they live attached to the walls for years. The procedure is simple: they are picked up by Ann grass and musk common that are able to grow on the bricks and they are glued on the wall, in the form of the words of Eleanor, with a natural mixture of yogurt and sugar.
An example of their collaboration are SporeBorne and Watch Your Skin Peel, so described by the artists: «Spores borne air represents the wind of change and movement, seeds that germinate, musk's spores in the air, damp, potential. Watch your skin peel can be seen how a metaphor of the conscious change, of the human body in a state of constant flow, the to throw aside the dead subject and the regeneration».

Ann Garforth is active also in the guerrilla gardening, another interesting example of artistic connection between art and nature.

Another meaningful artist is Edina Tokodi, a young street-artist ecologist that has decided to recover the relationship between the man and the nature distributing on the walls of her city, Williamsburg (Brooklyn), figures of animals cut out in the musk. The Tokodi has studied graphic arts and design to the Hungarian academy of Belle Arti and has completed the studies to Milan with a course of urban design. What pushes her in this form of art is the desire to study the way according to which the people welcome his small animals of musk. Its objective is to operate in direction of a harmonic relationship with the environment in which we live and that we often forget there to protect.
Edina describes her job in the blog Environmental Graffiti, where you can also find precious suggestions on as to create your own ecological graffiti.
«I believe that our distance from the nature both by now a cliche - she explains - The inhabitants of the city don't often have relationships with the animals or the green. How public artist I hear the duty to attract the attention on the lacks in our daily life. How cultivator of echo-urban sensibility, returns usually in the places to visit mine "cried" or "musk", at times to mend more generally them some but nothing because they potentially receive enough water from the air, from the condensation and from the rain. Also the reaction of whom lives the roads it is very important: I am curious of as the people receive them, if they want only to leave them alone, if they want to take care of him of them or to dismantle them. This is what makes my job similar to the graffiti, although I am looking for a social meaning more depth and of a dialogue with the memoirs of animals and gardens of my past in a small city of the Center Europe. I believe that if everybody had one garden of theirs to cultivate we would have a more balanced reaction with our territories. Of certain, a garden can be a lot of things».

The graffiti and the advertising ecological communication in reality have been tightening friendship since more or less two year and they have become must of the moment real. An example is the advertising country realized by the Green Graffiti with graffiti realized to water on the roads, perfectly washable. The company affirms to absolutely care the environmental sustainability and to give to organizations of beneficence 90 euro for every realized graffiti and besides, for every liter of water used, invests in a project of harvest that furnishes a liter of drinkable water to the inhabitants of an arid zone of Brazil. To today have stuck to the new advertising country some public institutions as the museum of Rotterdam, but also Mtv, Elle, Smart.