Police in the municipality next to Helsinki – the city of which you are deputy mayor – are currently investigating you over graffiti sprayed in a railway tunnel at the end of last month. What happened?
Paavo Arhinmäki: It was Midsummer, which is a time of the year when nothing much happens in Helsinki. In the early evening, a friend of mine and I drove down to Vuosaari harbour freight tracks just outside of Helsinki.
My friend and I drove past this tunnel that reminded us of an old freight tunnel in Pasila, the neighbourhood where we had grown up. Pasila is really the cradle of graffiti culture in Finland: an area full of freight yards, train tunnels and a massive number of concrete walls. It’s where I learned painting my own pictures after school in the late 80s and early 90s.
We stopped the car and got our spray cans out. The tunnel wall wasn’t an official wall for graffiti, but there were already lots of old paintings on it that no one had cleaned up for years, so we thought people just didn’t care.
It took us two hours to finish the painting. We were about to take pictures of our work when there were suddenly guards everywhere, shouting at us not to try to escape. I mean, were were two middle-aged guys, we weren’t going to run anywhere.
What kind of graffiti did you paint?
These days, graffiti is mainly about the lettering, but when my friends and I got into painting in the 80s, the backgrounds were more important. We painted the skyline of Pasila, with the sun going down. The two grey things in the middle of the text are two famous tower blocks in the neighbourhood. The words I painted are really a reference to the early New York graffiti of the 70s: “GCM”, which stands for “great career moves”. Which I guess is ironic given that I got caught and some people even called on me to resign.
Have you been fined?
Not yet, the police hearing will be after the summer. But if I do get fined, I will pay it. Of course, it was a really stupid thing to do. My friend and I will also pay the cleaning costs, which may be around €3,000. It’s a shame that it had to be removed so quickly – I didn’t even get a chance to take proper pictures. But I can see why, because it would have probably become a tourist attraction otherwise.
What’s the history of graffiti in Finland?
In a way graffiti came to Finland via the same route it came to most countries in Europe: there was the 1983 documentary Style Wars, Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s 1984 book Subway Art, and the more Hollywood-style film Beat Street around the same time.
Finland was a special case because even though we weren’t on the wrong side of the iron curtain, we were still somewhere in between east and west. So graffiti arrived a bit later, but there was a massive boom in the late 80s: every boy and girl at my school had their own tag. It wasn’t legal then, but it also wasn’t taken too seriously.
Things really changed when Helsinki was announced as the cultural capital of Europe for the year 2000, and the city started a big anti-graffiti campaign in the run-up. Paradoxically, the idea was to clean away lots of culture to make way for culture. Graffiti writers were effectively declared enemies of the state. There was a huge campaign trying to paint them as criminal and drug addicts, and the city hired plain-clothes security guards to catch them in the act.
I got back into graffiti through politics, when I got elected as a member of Helsinki city council as a 23-year-old in 2000. After I initiated a motion to paint back an erased graffiti in east Helsinki, I got a lot of phone calls from the mums of kids who had been beaten up by security staff. Young men were fined or sent to prison: the war on graffiti was destroying lives. I campaigned against Helsinki’s harsh measures and the waste of taxpayers’ money for seven years, and eventually people started to listen. In 2008, we succeeded in scrapping the zero-tolerance policy of old. Now we have official walls where people can paint all around the city, and see graffiti as a colourful part of our city’s culture.
The most commonly cited argument against graffiti is the “broken windows theory”, proposed by social scientists James Q Wilson and George L Kelling in 1982: that allowing visual signs of civic disorder creates an environment that breeds more of the same disorder. Are you not convinced by that argument?
The broken windows theory cannot be really applied to graffiti in a straightforward way. You can fix a window, but when you paint over a graffiti you destroy an artwork. And that often provokes other artists to spray over the same surface again, and often with less beautiful artworks.
Critics of our liberal approach say legal walls incite more illegal graffiti elsewhere, but we haven’t seen that. There’s always going to be some illegal graffiti, but every can in front of an official wall is one that isn’t used on an unofficial one.
Haven’t your own actions undermined the official wall policies you introduced?
Having official walls doesn’t mean that graffiti as a whole has been decriminalised. We don’t tolerate it everywhere, and the city still uses about €500,000 a year to clean up surfaces that have been painted on. But I believe there are different types of unofficial graffiti: painting on the backs of abandoned or industrial buildings or on concrete walls along freight-track lines is different to painting on listed buildings or private houses.
I believe that graffiti has been the most powerful art form of the last half-century, and official walls are important not just as a distraction for bored or disaffected youth, but as a training ground for future artists. It has brought countless young people into the art world. For many of the kids who painted or tagged around Helsinki in the 1980s, it became a springboard into fine art or the creative sector. The graffiti artist EGS is now one of the most interesting artists working in Finland, with a solo show coming to Helsinki’s Didrichsen Art Museum next year. During the era of zero-tolerance policy, all those kids would have immediately got a criminal record.
Were you pleased with the mural you got into trouble for?
It’s not for me to judge. When I was Finland’s minister for culture, I used to say politicians shouldn’t determine what is good art and what is bad art, and I’d better stick to that.
