AKAY BLACKBOOK 1996-1990

154 pages
34 x 25 cm (height x width x - if needed - depth)
English language
hardcover
Publisher: Toxoplasma
Second edition
2022

This is the second edition. Leaflets come in a wrapper with instructions on how to stick them. Including a glue stick.

This is a replica of Akay's first black book. Production of the original began in the fall of 1986, when 16-year-old Akay pasted an array of spray paint color swatches onto the front page of an unassuming, standard-size sketchbook. Through his nocturnal additions of sketches, photographs and newspaper clippings until the spring of 1990, the personal document of a prolific graffiti artist has become this unwitting chronicle of an era of graffiti in Stockholm.

There is a brief hiatus in Akay's meticulous record keeping just before Christmas 1988, when his father confiscated his original black book and locked it in a bank vault. His father threatened to throw him in the fire if Akay didn't stop painting graffiti. A few weeks after the black book was taken hostage, two police officers showed up at Akay's father's house with a search warrant. Akay and Weird were told to wait in the kitchen while the police searched Akay's basement bedroom for evidence to build their case against him - things like photos or sketches, or better again, all this evidence pasted into a book with the dates and locations written next to the pieces. But thanks to his father's failed attempts at parental extortion (not thanks to his father's wife who kept offering the cops coffee and refreshments), the police found nothing incriminating. The only slightly suspicious thing police could find was a cleverly arranged display of 280 colored spray cans, Akay's most prized possession at the time - second only to the imprisoned black book - that brightened up his windowless bedroom.

Now, over 30 years later, long after the contents could be used as evidence in prosecutable crimes or for manipulative parenting tactics, Akay's teenage black book has been reproduced and made available for the first time.