This easter morning, sticker-artist ‘LN’ invited me to join her on a street-art crusade in the heart of Amsterdam.

We started off early and walked from Spui square into smaller streets alongside the world-famous canals of the Dutch capital, sticking her art where ever we’d find a suitable spot for it.

During our walk, she explained to me about her artistic and societal ideas, while I was photographing the stickers she stuck on walls, rain-pipes and electrical cabinets.

‘LN’ at least is remarkable in the fact that all her stickers are ‘originals’, each and everyone of them is handmade and contains an original text that is held by a figure wearing a hoodie.

The sentences the stickers display can be societal, cultural, political, philosophical or – sometimes deeply – personal.

Unfortunately for us, within an hour after the offset of our crusade, a plainclothes policeman had caught up with us and interrupted our artistic mission. We tried explaining the idea of street-art to the cop but that was of no use.

‘LN’ therefore was picked up by a police van and transported to a police-station nearby. After being interrogated and an hour of incarceration she was released again. The government barbarians kept the stickers she didn’t spread yet, but gave her a pretty heavy fine – 140 euro’s – instead.

It’s not a nice thing to see art go to waste and an artist fined for something that can hardly be considered a crime. Unfortunately, this is how our ‘society’ tends to deal with non-conformists. It’s a thing we’ll have to deal with.

DF

Related:

Interview met ‘LN’

Sticker ‘LN’: kreten in Amsterdam

Tags:     Amsterdam   |   sticker