When the streets talk

When the Streets Talk

What can I say, most of us that come from Madrid, born in the 70’s have some special tender feeling about street art, the graffiti.

I remember being a kid when everyone was talking about some weird name, Muelle. At that time he was becoming a legend and the only thing we knew about him was that Madrid was crowded with his “signature”, a fun looking word that means a coil spring, one of those small elastic metal things that inhabited our mattresses.

The call of Juan Carlos Arguello (Muelle) goes far beyond just a random guy painting on the walls, he will become the inspiration for every young guy who needs to gather some guts to express himself on the streets of Madrid, knowing that doing so is illegal, and he will be the despair for so many of those, who had to spend long hours at the Metro of Madrid cleaning its walls from those nasty looking signatures.

Muelle is the precursor of street art in Madrid, Banksy back then was a baby boy crawling under a dinner table, and Arguello had already become a myth, someone who, if found painting on the streets, was asked for an autograph. Many of us, inspired by him, decided to go on the streets of our neighborhood armed with an Edding 500 to “dirt” all over the place, screwing our brains for a cool name to sign with, imagining and drawing on any surface we could find and getting into “signature battles”:
– Hey you! Are you Sony?
– Me? Donnow what you are talking ‘bout…
– Oh yeah, sure you do! You just signed over my signature on that garbage can! Now gimme your edding! (Lol)

What a common scenario those days in the neighborhood! We all tried, and very few were actually worth something, but no one seemed to be able to find "THE" emblem that would get to be the new Muelle.

Arguello has painted on the streets, in the subway, on the buildings, he was everywhere; apparently he was part of a Hip-Hop crew from the neighborhood of Campamento. Eventually he registered his signature, which was described by police as “kind of an arrow”. This “arrow” was so mysterious that it got to be associated by police with drug dealing activities for a long time, and it couldn’t be any further from the truth. In the 80's the government will try to use street art approach to drive the youngsters away from heroin and other heavy drugs — a huge challenge for the society of those years — and I remember seeing these adverts “Say NO to drugs” signed by Muelle.

Today there is only one graffiti of Muelle left in Madrid, the piece of street art protected and respected by every street artist, and as the time passes Madrid keeps evolving into a great city full of street art.
In Memorie of Juan Carlos Arguello AKA Muelle (Madrid 1966 – Madrid 1995)