Clet Abraham is one of Florence’s most recognisable street artists. Born in Brittany and long based in the city, he has made his name by transforming ordinary road signs with elegantly subversive stickers, turning otherwise silent urban furniture into philosophical provocations. We sat down with him to talk about the fine line between art and vandalism, the debt he owes to Florence and why he recently placed a Palestinian flag in the hands of a Medici.
You have spoken about the idea that art creates, while vandalism destroys. Where do you draw the line in your own work?
It’s a very interesting question, one that can’t be answered scientifically. It depends entirely on the situation. But I think the essential difference is this: destruction is easy. Breaking something is always easier than building it. What distinguishes art is that it adds something; it invites you to make a mental effort. When you stand in front of a work—street art or anything else—you should ask yourself: what does this give me and what does it take away? That, I think, is the role of street art: to develop critical thinking.
The head was lost for good, but I remade it, using the original template I still have. The body was eventually recovered by the rowers’ club on the Arno, the Canottieri di Firenze, who were kind enough to return it. In a strange way, the whole episode ended up being an opportunity since I didn’t know how to clean it properly, and getting it back made that possible. It was also a chance to reassert the distinction between art and vandalism because my work had been labelled “unauthorized”, effectively branded as vandalism. But art is free. Art doesn’t need to ask anyone’s permission. It already has permission. Art cannot be abusive or illegal; that would be like talking about a carnivorous vegetarian. It doesn’t exist.
Have you gotten in trouble for it?
There were two complaints from the municipality over L’Uomo Comune, and I won both. There was also a prosecution brought by the public prosecutor’s office, and I won that too. But what I find genuinely interesting is this: why did the people who wrote the law feel the need to state that art is free? What prompted that? (Ed. Clet is talking about Article 33 of the Italian Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of arts, sciences and their teaching) And notice how they associated art with science. Why? Because they are the two great modes of inquiry. One more material, perhaps, and one more spiritual. Society absolutely needs outlets like these. Without them, it would suffocate, trapped within fixed boundaries.
Do you see acts of vandalism against your work as a continuation of the dialogue you begin or as a misunderstanding of it?
Both, and that’s precisely what makes it interesting. Pulling the work down is pure vandalism, there’s no doubt. But the stickers are more contradictory. On one level, placing a sticker over the work is a form of pollution; it makes the piece less pure, less clean. That’s vandalism, if you want to call it that. On another level, the gesture comes from a desire to participate in the message of L’Uomo Comune, a claim of freedom. It isn’t a constructive act of freedom, so it isn’t art in itself. But when the stickers multiply, when they accumulate in their hundreds, a new work emerges from the chaos, a work in motion. And in that moment, the collective gesture becomes artistic. It’s funny, the individual act is vandalism; the whole becomes art. I find that very beautiful.
Does Florence inspire your art?
There’s something I’d really like Florence to understand: it wasn’t an accident that this project began here. If I had been in New York, for example, I probably wouldn’t have thought to work with road signs because a road sign in New York doesn’t challenge you the way one does in Florence. Here, in a city of this particular aesthetic and humanist tradition, a road sign is aesthetic violence. It’s an eyesore. Florence invited me to identify this subject. I would go so far as to say that this project could only have been born in Florence. I am simply the vehicle for an idea that was already intrinsic to the city.
How has your relationship with the city evolved over the years?
For things to evolve, I’d need more institutional recognition. At that point I could move on from one kind of struggle and begin another. But Florence, at the institutional level, still doesn’t quite have the courage to do it, though they are getting closer, slowly, year by year, but they haven’t taken that step yet. And that holds me back.
Last summer, you placed a Palestinian flag in the hands of Cosimo de’ Medici in piazza della Signoria. What role do you see art playing in contemporary geopolitics?
Particularly today, and particularly when it comes to this “problem”—I won’t even call it a conflict because that word implies something it isn’t—there is such enormous economic power behind the Israeli propaganda machine, propagated through images, texts and narratives, that counter-images become essential. That propaganda is entirely constructed, entirely false, entirely in the service of colonialism. So it becomes very important to offer images that are powerful, universal and capable of redressing the balance.
Can you tell us anything about what you’re working on now?
I find it hard to talk about projects in progress. I like to leave space for things to evolve. What I can say is that I made this small sticker, and I’m now applying the design to a three-metre-long canvas (Ed. Clet shows me the sticker, which is a reinterpretation of the Italian police logo, only instead of POLIZIA [police], it reads PULIZIA [cleanliness]). It’s something I find beautiful because some will immediately read it as a provocation towards the police, but cleanliness is harmless.
Clet’s works can be found throughout Florence. For more information, visit his studio in via dell’Olmo.
