Tag — Graffiti Cartoon Horse, Youth Centre, Berlin

The centre runs spray-painting workshops for teenagers. They came to us with a photograph of the wall in their yard and a question: could a sculpture be treated like a wall?

The answer, and the condition

Yes, with one condition we insisted on. No readable lettering. Not because lettering is a problem artistically — it is the reason graffiti works — but because the piece had to be permanent. A sculpture carrying a name or a tag becomes dated within a season, and the young people who painted it move on.

So the piece carries a wildstyle geometric pattern: interlocking angular forms that read as graffiti at a distance and resolve, as you approach, into pure shape with nothing to read.

Built by the people who will use it

The shell was laminated and primed at our workshop, then the surface work was done at the centre over six evenings by nine young people working with two experienced writers. They laid down colour fields, built the fades with airbrush, added the drips, then sealed it.

Their two rules for the piece, which we accepted: nothing above eye level on the head, so the animal keeps its face, and nothing over the eyes at all. It is a horse first. That was their call and it was the right one.

The horse underneath

We designed the form to be a heavy horse with the head lowered, because a lowered head gives one large curving surface down the neck and shoulder — an area roughly two metres square, which is the size of a wall section and the size these painters are used to working at.

In the yard

It stands against the north wall, where the afternoon light rakes across the painted surface and the airbrush fades read at full strength. The centre says the group that painted it now brings visitors to see it, which is a thing that had not happened before.