5MINUTES WITH: JEANZ [BELGRAD]

For this 5MINUTES episode we left Germany to meet with a graffiti writer who has also been mentioned in the ILOVEGRAFFITI.DE podcast several times: JEANZ from the STU CREW in Belgrade.
The Serbian sprayer moved from his small hometown to the former capital of Yugoslavia in 2000 and quickly made a name for himself there. In a city that was heavily bombed by NATO only a year earlier, which can still be seen in today's cityscape. The Serbian people have only just chased away a regime, a revolution that was directed against longstanding economic misery and costly wars, led by a young generation who wanted to be the bearers of new values.
Even more than 20 years later, all of this is still very present, in people's minds, but also in the way in which graffiti was and is painted and celebrated in Belgrade. In regards to consequence, to the passion and the “Belgrade Style”. It has its origins in the aftermath of a war and a revolution, but also corruption, poverty and the associated social grievances, possibly comparable to what we know from the New York seventies and eighties. JEANZ compares his first graffiti years today with “an step out of the darkness” and the attempt to escape from what ruined many young people back then.
In addition, there are external stylistic influences, because in the past 20 years many graffiti writers from Berlin or Paris have traveled to Belgrade to paint there, to enjoy the atmosphere that is probably unique in Europe and to network with the movement there. Belgrade has not only given some of the Balkan flair to many “graffiti tourists”, but has also given it back to them.
The graffiti writer JEANZ was able to create his own cosmos of letters, figures and style elements and decisively shaped the “Belgrade Style”. On many levels: on trains, on the train line and in the streets of the 1.4 million inhabitants city. JEANZ stands for graffiti on the Belgrade S-Train BEOVOZ, next to the tram the most important rail-based mass transport in the Serbian capital. Which in the course of the next few years should lead to the fact that the system was completely painted, blown up and created a look like in New York of the eighties and Rome or Dortmund in the nineties.
We visited JEANZ in Belgrade, interviewed and followed him for (as always a little more than) five minutes and went through his photo archive: 5MINUTES WITH: JEANZ
ilovegraffiti.de
arte.tv/5minutes
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JEANZ ON INSTAGRAM:
/ og___king
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