We recently connected with Boa Mistura and have shared our conversation below.

Boa, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

We come from graffiti, from learning empirically based on mistakes and experiences. From “do it yourself”.
Today, it is exciting to see that, like other colleagues, we have managed to make a living from our hobby, and that today there is an ecosystem that allows many urban artists to make a living from their work, something unthinkable 20 years ago.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hi! we are Boa Mistura, a multidisciplinary team with roots in graffiti born at the end of 2001 in Madrid. Our work is mainly developed in public space. We understand our work as a tool to transform the city and create links between people. We feel a responsibility towards the city and the time in which we live.

Boa Mistura we are: Javier Serrano, Juan Jaume, Pablo Ferreiro and Pablo Purón.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The four of us had been painting graffiti together since the late 90´s. Most of it ilegal.
At the end of 2009 we were facing the end of our university careers (Architecture, Fine Arts, Graphic Design and Advertising).
Juan was finishing Fine Arts at the UDK in Berlin, and we went to spend a month in the city, where we painted almost every day.

It was at that moment that we decided that this was the way of life we wanted to lead.
When we returned to Madrid neither of us looked for a job in what we had studied. We looked for a small space in the center of the city (an old sausage store) that we turned into our studio.
At that moment, we started to dedicate ourselves 24/7 to what had been our hobby since we were 14 years old, turning it into our job.

At that time, art in public space was still unpopular, there were no platforms to support it as there are now, and neither the companies nor the city councils were as interested in this discipline as they are now.
We had to invent our own way, together with other colleagues who at that time also fought to make graffiti a way of life.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

From our years painting graffiti we learned many things that today continue to mark much of the body of our work; the attraction for the street as a meeting point and dialogue between our work and the viewer, learning to do things with your own tools, betting and constantly risk for passion for what you do …. But we have also had to shed some things, like the ego that we dragged as graffiti artists.

It was in 2011, during an artist residency in Cape Town.
We landed in a suburb, which at the time was suffering from a tremendous problem of gangs, drug dealing and prostitution.
In this context, four foreigners painting in the gang-dominated streets was unthinkable, so we spent the first few days simply walking around the neighborhood and talking to the locals.

They told us how the city had stigmatized them and turned its back on them, and that therefore anything that was done in the neighborhood, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant it might seem, could make a big change, and inspire the children who played in the streets every day.

This fact made us rethink our way of understanding the street.
Just putting our name, as we had been doing since graffiti, in a context like that did not make any sense.

In South Africa we felt a responsibility as agents of transformation of public space, and since then, we always try to link our work in public space with the place where it will belong.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.boamistura.com
• Instagram: @boamistura
• Facebook: BoaMistura
• Linkedin: Boa Mistura
• Twitter: @BoaMistura1
• Youtube: @boamistura