AKIM - interview
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1. Could you please introduce yourself and when did you come into contact with graffiti and streetart?

People call me Akim and I am a typoval low-live-bastard, who came in contact with graffiti in Berlin. I visited Berlin for the first time in 1986 and moved there one year later with my parents. One day in April 1988 I felt for the first time at home in the "cage". Berlin at this time was still surrounded by the wall, which gave me this weird feeling to be saved somehow. Gong outside meant always being still inside. There was no possible outside.

When I was in 4th class a classmate showed her brother's "black-book" to me and a couple of friends. She couldn't explain us what we were looking at. We could catch those wild colors but couldn't figure that all that was about stylistic letters, which were combined to a highly designed and stylized name. I felt like a detective on a mission, without even knowing was the mission was. From that moment on I was infected with graffiti not knowing anything about it, just sešiny empty forms. But I was furious to find out what that stuff was about.
Soon I got more answers than questions left I could asked.

Back than, I of course knew some known artists. I already understood that their names were famous, even if most of the people didn't knew their work so well. But all those artists were obviously not famous because of their names, their names were only famous because of their work. And their work disappeared even there were everybody would still call their names.

Exploring graffiti I was confronted with the conversion. All those colorful name designs allover the city, names one couldn't find anywhere else as at those walls. The names would disappear as soon as they would disappear from the walls, as soon one would stop going out there, being busy. Those names were only famous for their names.

From that moment on I never stopped writing my name, even if the way of doing so changed a lot over the years. In the first five years I tried to do what other people haven't done yet, I tried to invent new stuff, to develop unseen forms and color combinations. The following five years I spent traveling through different forms of expressions and materials. I worked with music, design, film etc. When 10 years were over, I went back to the zero point and made a restart – build up everything again, but differently.

2. I remember that you used to do big mural paintings with characters and poems in the past. How do you look at this now? Did you just simplify your style like a minimalist or is that just another period?

Thankfully if a period is over, we have been gone through time and made it. The past is gone, but we are still there, somehow we've survived. I don't know, but maybe yes, maybe compared to those stylistic and overly poetic mural paintings I am in a minimalist period right now. But everything what happened was important for my work. If I wouldn't have had gone so far with the stylistic exploration of "traditional graffiti", there wouldn't be the possibility of reduction.

In this way one could also say, that there is a lineage. The figures/characters from the past became the real and abstract object figure in my newer works. The big mural paintings on the other hand, were I brought poetry, empty signs and figural painting together, became what one could call a social sculpture. When I do my cooking projects, style-battles or other events and performances the social sculpture is not about the artist as a creator anymore, but about the work and its surroundings, the city itself.

And yes besides all those aesthetic and stylistic questions of my objects, tags or writings, I think what really matters to me is the intervention in public space. I think all my work has really a lot to do with this Berlin experience, when the wall was still there. The feeling that there was no outside, but only sites, which could be your home, your play ground and meeting point, your studio and exhibition place. For me it really depends how you are using all those certain "artistic" forms to intervene and transform those sites into something else.

When I speak about intervention in public space, I cannot differentiate between "the one" and "the corner", between the individual and forms of collectivity. I also must say, that the idea of the "corner" were always of big concern for my work. No individual action, no spreading of the name, no aesthetic decision makes any sense without the possibility of the people who are able to understand, who are able to communicate, to compete to support or get support themselves.

But the corner has another advantage. The more time I spend in the world of the corner, the less it interests me what for example the so called professional art world expects. Even if I am interested and if I am in fact following what is going on there, I don't get affected so easily by it. Graffiti is another world, with other rules; there are no other institutions, no galleries and auctions houses. It is only the one public space and the corner.

3. You are famous for your own logotype, which you modulace each time for different space. Could you tell us something about how you came up with this?

I studied the graffiti world for a decade, when I got back to point zero, I tried to let all my experiences of the "game" culminate in one new form. Within the universe of signs and information, the score to go down is easier then to "getting up". It's no big deal to make use of an old idea e.g. to create a font as I did. What seems to matter much more is the question of context e.g. to practice that font in the urban and public space – questions of architecture, advertisement, urban planning etc. Anyway, when I industrialized my name in one font, I wanted that any modification of it could be traced back to its formal origin. Thus I guess back than, people in Berlin were just waiting for the millennium, everybody had this uncertain certain expectation – but everything we got was in fact nothing new, we got the same old methods, with new methods.

4. You live in Berlin, but you are originally from Vietnam. Do you feel German or do you think that your mentality is still Asian? Could you somehow compare these two worlds?

Somehow I would say it is not that easy, it is not this or that. I would say that I am rather affected by more than two worlds. I don't know what it is to feel Vietnamese or German. I first of all feel well getting my work done. But sure maybe it is the fact that I am from Vietnam which gave me some kind of openness to be more concerned with and affected by all kind influences, which makes some little daily life experience more important to me than the identification with concepts of being Vietnamese or German.

5. You have been in Prague on several occasions. What do you like most about our city? Do you already have an idea about what you would like to do here?

Back in the days when I was in grammar school, Prague was still the capital of Czechoslovakia until I witnessed the split of the country. My relationship with Prague started in summer 1992. We were on the way to Lake Balaton in Hungary and stopped there for one night. While our parents were already sleeping, we climbed out of the window. Walking through the city at night, we were looking for nice places to some silver pieces. We found a blackened facade, close to the metro station Muzeum and Vltavska. Since there were almost no graffiti's back than, we understood this lack as a general mission: "graffiti goes east." And it became somehow true, from the beginning of the 90ies until now writers heading east. They are fascinated by the east, first because of the absence of this culture and today because it has so much developed. Everybody has to come back again and again to see all the mutations of that virus we call writing. The development of graffiti writing in Prague and other cities in eastern countries can therefore also be seen from another perspective. Unfortunately graffiti goes along with the whole gentrification phenomenon, the appearance of writing seems to have announced the upcoming disease of the so called "free world" and with the establishment of the new standardizations, graffiti of course vanished from the streets again, it gets cleaned.

I am also planning to interview the people I will meet at my daily walks. Here I would like to place the “names” of those people on a big wall. Starting from the bottom I will cross the wall, elevating my position from time to time toward the top of the wall. The performance of writing will be captured on video, which will be edited and somehow manipulated. The video as well as the collection of the found objects I will show in the gallery.