GIVING TO THE POOR

LISBON, PORTUGAL. 2008

Giving to the Poor marks the first stencil work by Tavar Zawacki, who at that time was known exclusively under his moniker ABOVE. Until this moment, ABOVE was recognized internationally for the arrow symbol and his large-scale Word Play murals. The Lisbon stencil signaled a clear transition in approach: away from iconic symbols and text-based Word Play works, and into figurative imagery that addressed social and political themes with observational sharpness drawn directly from the street itself.

During his stay in Lisbon, Zawacki passed the same street each day and repeatedly saw a woman seated near the entrance of a bank — often barefoot, visibly struggling, and asking for change. A few meters away, a steady line of locals and tourists waited at the bank’s ATM. Two contrasting realities sat side by side, divided only by a blank stretch of wall. That empty space — the space between them — became the spark. It was there that Zawacki imagined a visual bridge: a figure transferring money from those who had access to it toward the person who appeared most in need.

Zawacki asked a friend to pose as the masked figure he envisioned. He photographed his friend in the role of the “robber,” using those images as reference material to design and refine the final stencil.

The power of the stencil was rooted in that unscripted, real-life situation. The street already held the perfect scene — the characters, the tension, the imbalance. The stencil was simply placed into it, acknowledging what was already there and giving the contrast a visible form.

Months later, after returning to California, Zawacki produced a limited edition of 250 prints based on the work. The full edition sold out, and he donated 100% of the proceeds to a homeless shelter in Lisbon. The title, Giving to the Poor, echoed both the visual act in the piece and the real-world gesture that followed it.

Although modest in scale, this stencil highlighted a turning point in Zawacki’s practice — one where observation became imagery, and where an intervention on a wall extended beyond the frame into lived social impact.

During a brief visit to Paris in 2010. While exploring the city, Zawacki encountered an unused concrete frame built into the façade of a building near the Louvre. The empty rectangle — decorative but functionless — immediately struck him as a readymade stage for a site-specific intervention.

In 2010, a rising trend had emerged in which street artworks were being chipped from walls, removed without permission, and sold on the secondary market — most notably works by Banksy. The irony was unavoidable: illegal artworks were now being illegally stolen for profit.

Responding to that cultural moment, Zawacki staged a new scenario. He photographed a friend posing as a masked thief holding a blank sheet, later using those images to design the stencil positioned beside the architectural frame.

The thief presents a reworked version of a Banksy stencil — the well-known rat originally painted with the text “Because I’m worthless.” Zawacki transformed the phrase into “Because now I’m worth it,” using this reversal to highlight the shifting perception and growing commercial value of street art, particularly at a moment when works by Banksy were being removed from public walls and sold on the secondary market.

The stencil functions as a commentary on authorship, value, theft, and the strange economies that form around works never meant to enter the marketplace. By positioning the figure next to the gilded frame on the wall, Zawacki turns the façade itself into a conversation about legitimacy: what counts as an artwork, who assigns value, and when an image becomes “worth it.”

The piece extends an ongoing dialogue within street art — one Banksy himself once articulated with the line,
“A lot of people never use their initiative because no one told them to.”

Here, Zawacki uses initiative to mirror the full cycle: creation, dismissal, recognition, commodification, and eventual disappearance from the street.

Timing Is Everything was created in Shoreditch in 2013 as a site-specific stencil built around a simple question: what if the artwork were dependent on the time of day — and only revealed its meaning once the sun went down?

ABOVE spent several nights walking through East London in search of a fixed light source that could cast a reliable, unchanging shadow. He eventually found it in a leaning parking pole illuminated by a streetlamp in Shoreditch. Every night, the lamp projected a long, crisp silhouette that stretched across the pavement and rose onto the adjacent wall at the exact same angle. This nightly shadow became the missing element ABOVE wanted to activate.

Many passersby saw only a colorful body suspended in mid-air.

But when the sun went down and the shadow came up — when the streetlamp switched on — the pole’s silhouette aligned precisely with the lad’s arm, completing the illusion. What appeared unfinished by day became perfectly resolved by night. Timing is Everything.

London street-art blogs highlighted the work for its playful intelligence and engineering-like precision. Nighttime pedestrians — especially those leaving nearby pubs — often encountered the moment of alignment by surprise, watching the shadow slide into place and suddenly “explain” the image. The artwork existed in two states, but only one contained its full meaning.

Timing Is Everything turned a shadow into a collaborator and transformed a mundane piece of city infrastructure into the final stroke of the stencil. ABOVE created an intervention that relied not on paint alone, but on time, light, and the city’s own choreography.

It began with a single line — an electrical cable running in a loose arc across the façade of a building in Madrid. Its natural slope suggested movement and precarious balance, and ABOVE saw in it the perfect stage for a performer. He introduced a stencil of a man on a unicycle, mid-motion, juggling flaming torches. The cable became the tightrope; the wall became the arena.

The intervention operated through simple visual logic. Each element of the scene — the unicycle, the juggling, the fire — carried its own associations with fear, difficulty, and control. Set on top of the cable, the figure appeared to inhabit a moment of concentrated courage: moving forward while managing multiple risks at once. The title, stenciled beside the line, reinforced this reading without overstating it.

Much of the piece’s strength came from its restraint. ABOVE did not alter the cable or disguise it; he treated it as a collaborator. The environment completed the image, allowing the city’s existing infrastructure to become part of the narrative. Passersby encountered not a spectacle but an unexpectedly fitting alignment — a performer rising, quite literally, above his fears.

RISE ABOVE MY FEARS exemplified ABOVE’s approach during this period: using the street’s own geometry as a catalyst for storytelling, and finding moments where a single line could carry both humor and meaning.

While walking down the street in Lisbon, Portugal, ABOVE came across a wall smothered with layers of handwritten tags — every inch of concrete covered by names competing for space. Inspired by this chaotic collision of identities, he framed the entire mess with a white rectangular border, transforming it into a makeshift classroom chalkboard. The tags became the “lesson,” and the wall itself became the scene.

To complete the setup, ABOVE introduced a stern teacher pointing directly at the many different hand-painted names, while a young boy in a dunce cap sits slumped beside her. The implication is clear: the boy is blamed for tagging his name on the wall, even though the surface is obviously covered by dozens of others. It's a staged moment of misplaced punishment — a familiar ritual of public embarrassment placed into an urban context, where the street becomes the classroom and every passerby becomes an involuntary witness.

This gap between culprit and crime is the heart of the piece. Whose Handwriting Is This? becomes a critique of how societies assign blame — often arbitrarily — to maintain control. The community’s marks become the evidence; the child becomes the scapegoat. The work blurs the line between vandalism and self-expression, discipline and spectacle, guilt and projection.

THE NAKED TRUTH played on the familiar proverb: “Believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” ABOVE translated this saying into a site-specific scene of visual misdirection and street-level theater. He discovered a metal cage fixed against a wall — a structure that, with a bit of imagination, resembled the outline of a shower stall. That accidental architecture became the foundation of the piece.

ABOVE installed a bright pink fabric as a makeshift shower curtain, added a painted towel hanging nearby, and mounted a sculptural shower head fitted with long blue plastic strands to mimic falling water. Only the top half of a relaxed, bathing woman was stenciled on the wall, her head tilted back into the stream. Everything below the curtain remained unseen — and, crucially, nonexistent.

Curiosity did the rest. Anyone bold enough to peek behind the curtain expecting to find the woman’s body instead encountered the proverb stenciled inside the stall: “BELIEVE NOTHING THAT YOU HEAR, AND ONLY HALF OF WHAT YOU SEE!” The message snapped the illusion in half and revealed the underlying concept: perception is unreliable, assumption is seductive, and even in the public realm, seeing is never the same as knowing.

THE NAKED TRUTH was a witty blend of wordplay and physical intervention — a reminder that ABOVE’s practice in this period extended far beyond stencils alone. The work hinged on human behavior, spatial context, and the humor found in misdirection, continuing his exploration of how text, imagery, and the street itself could collaborate to tell a story.

First Love is one of ABOVE’s most sentimental early stencil works, centered on the universal memory of discovering affection for the first time. The scene depicts two schoolchildren— a young girl blowing heart-shaped bubbles and a boy leaping with full effort to catch them. The simplicity of the gesture carries a familiar emotional weight: the innocence, optimism, and clumsy bravery of childhood love.

To build the imagery, ABOVE photographed two close friends’ children, later translating their movements into multi-layered stencils. The piece was first painted on a school playground, a location chosen for its authenticity to the story. The immediacy of the setting—gave the work a sincerity that a normal street wall could never match.

The image later became a sought-after screenprint edition, allowing collectors to bring this early moment of affection into their own homes.

In 2012, ABOVE encountered an unexpected reinterpretation in San Sebastián, Spain: a bootleg mural mirroring First Love, but with two boys leaping for the girl’s hearts. The copy introduced a playful twist—competition, desire, and a more chaotic version of young romance—while underscoring the reach and influence of the original work.

24% DESEMPLEADOS was created by Tavar Zawacki (then working anonymously as ABOVE) during the Asalto Festival in Zaragoza in 2012, at a moment when Spain’s unemployment rate hovered around 24% — the highest in the European Union, and more than double the EU average. Youth unemployment exceeded 50%, making joblessness one of the defining pressures of Spanish public life at the time.

Zawacki responded by painting “24% DESEMPLEADOS” (24% UNEMPLOYMENT) and a procession of life-size silhouettes queued beneath signs reading “OFICINA DE EMPLEO” (Employment Office). To build the figures, he photographed local residents posing as if waiting in a real unemployment line, then used their outlines as stencils.

Black and grey profiles stretch the length of the wall: some standing, some slouched, some holding a child or a briefcase. The group becomes a slow-moving graph of people rather than data — the statistic made human-scale.

The mural uses the street as its evidence. Rather than inventing a scene, Zawacki inserted the forms into an existing urban setting already marked by economic tension. The minimalist silhouettes, repeating shadows, and stripped-back palette sharpen the contrast between official numbers and lived reality.

24% DESEMPLEADOS circulated widely online and through local press as a pointed visual record of the moment: a simple composition that turned unemployment from an abstract figure into a public queue that anyone could walk beside.

Painted on 3 October 2009, exactly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and 19 years to the day after German reunification was declared, ABOVE returned to this historic site to create a work about healing, contact, and shared humanity.

Working directly on a surviving section of the Wall, ABOVE staged a symbolic moment of reconciliation. A friend positioned on the opposite side of the concrete barrier reached a hand through a natural crack in the wall — offering a bouquet of bright flowers to whoever might stand on the western side.

That outstretched arm becomes the first protagonist: a quiet gesture of hope breaking through the remains of division.

Opposite this, ABOVE painted a young blonde-haired girl leaping upward with joy, stretching her arm to receive the flowers. She becomes the second protagonist — the embodiment of openness, possibility, and the next generation reaching toward connection rather than conflict.

Beside her stands a painted East German officer, not with hostility but with a disarming smile. His presence subverts expectations: instead of enforcing separation, he seems to acknowledge the symbolic exchange unfolding beside him. His stance completes the scene — a wall once built to divide now becomes a stage for a message that moves in the opposite direction.

The result is a living tableau of contact across borders. A literal crack in the Berlin Wall becomes a bridge. A small gesture becomes a quiet counter-history. And in this moment, ABOVE transforms a site of former hostility into a reminder that even the hardest boundaries can be softened by human hands reaching toward each other.

In January 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing an estimated 220,000 people, injuring more than 300,000, and leaving 1.5 million Haitians displaced. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern history and triggered a massive international humanitarian response. At the time of the earthquake, ABOVE was in Cuba — a country that sits geographically between Haiti (its closest neighbor, only 80 km across the water) and the United States, its long-time political adversary. This geographic triangle became the conceptual heart of the project.

THE SOCIAL VERSION — “HAITI”
ABOVE created the first stencil as an act of solidarity. It depicts a young Cuban boy standing at the edge of the sea, waving the Haitian flag, wearing a life vest and carrying a First Aid kit. An inflatable inner tube encircles his body — a symbol of improvised travel, survival, and urgency.

A painted signpost beside him points toward HAITI , suggesting that, if he could, this child would cross the water himself to help his devastated neighbor. This version speaks to compassion, proximity, and shared vulnerability. It imagines a world where ordinary people respond to crisis not through politics, but through empathy.

THE POLITICAL VERSION — “ESTADOS UNIDOS”
ABOVE then altered his own stencil, transforming the social gesture into a political statement.

The Haitian flag becomes an American flag. The First Aid kit becomes a suitcase — a symbol of migration, hope, and escape. The signpost now points ~> ESTADOS UNIDOS.

In this revised version, the boy is no longer heading toward a neighbor in need; he is the one seeking help. The work addresses the longstanding friction between Cuba and the United States, highlighting the desire of many Cubans to migrate despite political division, danger at sea, and decades of diplomatic hostility.

A DOUBLE PORTRAIT OF NEED AND RESPONSIBILITY

By presenting two nearly identical images with three decisive changes, ABOVE shifts the narrative from: Cuba helping Haiti >>> to Cuba asking the U.S. for help.

Both stencils mirror each other, forcing viewers to confront a difficult truth: Need is universal, and roles of “rescuer” and “rescued” can flip instantly depending on the context.

The piece also becomes a commentary on geopolitics vs. humanity — how borders shape fate, and how compassion often emerges from those with the least to give.

ABOVE created a life-size stencil of a seated figure holding a cardboard sign reading
“HAVE 2 PAINT, LOOKING 4 RIDE… ANYWHERE!!!”

The man sits on stacked paint buckets, roller in hand, extending a thumb in the universal gesture of hitchhiking. Placed beside a busy traffic light in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, the piece plays with the rhythms of the street: drivers pause, glance, and momentarily negotiate whether the figure is real.

Shortly after its appearance, rumors circulated that the piece was a self-portrait—an allusion to ABOVE’s nomadic years (1996–2016) spent traveling and painting across continents.

ABOVE clarified that the model was a friend.

Yet the narrative embedded in the stencil reflects his own experience: the restless mobility of an artist in constant search of the next wall, the next city, the next possibility.In this way, the figure becomes a stand-in for a broader creative condition—resourceful, itinerant, and propelled more by the urge to paint than by any fixed destination.

In this expansive street installation, ABOVE stages a poetic exchange between a guitarist and a flamenco dancer, each anchored to opposite ends of a weathered wall in Madrid. The scene is animated by a series of large, hand-cut musical notes suspended from a high wire overhead. These floating forms bridge the physical distance between the two figures, giving the impression that the music is literally traveling through the air.

ABOVE pairs this visual choreography with a concise wordplay diptych: “EASE MY TEARS” beside the guitarist, and “TEASE MY EARS” beside the dancer. The mirrored language flips expectation and meaning, aligning the emotional weight of each figure with their role in the exchange — the musician channeling sorrow into sound, the dancer inviting that sound to ignite movement.

By combining stencil, sculptural installation, and linguistic reversal, ABOVE transforms a simple courtyard wall into a stage where music becomes visible, emotion becomes spatial, and the relationship between performer and listener is momentarily suspended in mid-air.