C215 Playlist
- Text by Amrita Riat
- Photography by Teresa Madeline
Two masters degrees, one in Renaissance History and the other in German Romanticism, couldn’t stop Christian from becoming a cultural rebel. His fate was sealed as a teenager tagging walls with love messages to girls he liked, and then later when he took on the illegal walls of Paris armed with a stencil, insane creativity and an astute sense of context.
Exhibiting at StolenSpace Gallery in London twenty five years after he first started, the French street artist gave HUCK a candid interview sketching out his regrets (“I wish I had a better job”), shading his body of work with meaning (“It’s something that gathers rather than divides”), and connecting the dots that drew the path to where he is now, including his street art inspirations – Swoon and Banksy.
We’ve dug out three compilations of each artist’s work from the abyss that is YouTube, catching their curb-side processes on camera and backing it all up with some sick beats.
Video: Street Art by C215
Playback: Down The Road by C2C
While a vandal destroys, Christian creates. Under the pseudonym of C215, Christian spray paints and stencils his pieces on the world canvas using his surrounds as lexicon, bringing colour to some of the darkest corners of society in just a matter of minutes.
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Video: Street Art by Swoon
Playback: I Love The Drums by Lasse Loöq
Swoons real surname may be Curry, but her preferred consistency is wheatpaste – slapped across her prints to make them stick on an abandoned wall in quick time – giving her artwork a semi-permanent place in society’s derelict spaces. Just as many of C215’s most renowned works feature his ten year old Nina, Swoon’s paper cut-outs often revolve around her family and friends.
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Video: Street Art by Banksy
Playback: Loops of Fury by The Chemical Brothers
Love him or hate him, there is no denying Banksy’s sense of satire and absolute ballsy-ness: casually climbing up a ladder to leave his mark on the 425-mile-long West Bank barrier separating Israel from the Palestinian territories, while armed guards jam round the corner, comes to mind. Street arts’ most notorious and least seen, this vid covers the sneaky artist’s token monochrome epigrams and stencils, and even gives a glimpse of him at work in London.
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Latest on Huck
Clubbing is good for your health, according to neuroscientists
We Become One — A new documentary explores the positive effects that dance music and shared musical experiences can have on the human brain.
Written by: Zahra Onsori
In England’s rural north, skateboarding is femme
Zine scene — A new project from visual artist Juliet Klottrup, ‘Skate Like a Lass’, spotlights the FLINTA+ collectives who are redefining what it means to be a skater.
Written by: Zahra Onsori
Donald Trump says that “everything is computer” – does he have a point?
Huck’s March dispatch — As AI creeps increasingly into our daily lives and our attention spans are lost to social media content, newsletter columnist Emma Garland unpicks the US President’s eyebrow-raising turn of phrase at a White House car show.
Written by: Emma Garland
How the ’70s radicalised the landscape of photography
The ’70s Lens — Half a century ago, visionary photographers including Nan Goldin, Joel Meyerowitz and Larry Sultan pushed the envelope of what was possible in image-making, blurring the boundaries between high and low art. A new exhibition revisits the era.
Written by: Miss Rosen
The inner-city riding club serving Newcastle’s youth
Stepney Western — Harry Lawson’s new experimental documentary sets up a Western film in the English North East, by focusing on a stables that also functions as a charity for disadvantaged young people.
Written by: Isaac Muk
The British intimacy of ‘the afters’
Not Going Home — In 1998, photographer Mischa Haller travelled to nightclubs just as their doors were shutting and dancers streamed out onto the streets, capturing the country’s partying youth in the early morning haze.
Written by: Ella Glossop