We went for a walk through town yesterday and on the way back came across two guys painting a wall.
The guy on the left is Lars Jensen who used to perform as a rapper under the name L:Ron:Harald when I went to gymnasium in Tønder. I still remember the first time in ’98 when I heard a copy of his mixtape where he does gangster rap in the Southern Danish dialect. It was epic – nobody had ever done anything like that! He went on to release 5 records under that alias. He has been an active graffiti artist since he was young and has put colours on Sønderborg for three decades now. (Which I think he does under the name El’Jay?) This is what the piece on Jernbanegade looked like when we came by.
Before writing this post I hadn’t seen much street art in Sønderborg but it seems like ElJay/L:Ron and others have been very productive in the past. What is now a big hole in the ground used to be a supermarket with a huge, dark parking lot where the city allowed kids to express their graffiti skills. David Sass travelling around nothern Europe on a bike stumbled on the famous parking basement in Sønderborg, full of graffiti and made this video of the parking garage that no longer exists: