Alias was here. His signature stencils, cunningly pasted on unexpected walls, are peppered around Auroville. He couldn’t have found a more appropriate setting in India. This experimental township, founded in 1968, is gradually evolving into an incubator for all forms of art, from painting to pottery. Now, as street interventions get increasingly popular, thanks to festivals like St+Art India, art and graffiti appear in unexpected spaces, from dramatically dilapidated buildings to prim Government offices, all over the country. Old-school artists stay determinedly anonymous, going only by their street names, hence, Alias. The secretive German street artist has had a significant influence on the cityscape of Berlin, where he has been active for over a decade. His work can also be seen in Paris, Rome, Bristol and Istanbul. He usually paints at night with his face covered, doing paste-ups, cut-outs or directly spraying images on walls. His signature work depicts forlorn children and men in hoodies, all cleverly positioned in unpredictable spaces. Tracking him down is surprisingly easy — he has a Facebook page, and promptly replies to messages. Alias says he began spray-painting at 14 in his parent’s village in Germany, to protest a proposed nuclear dumping ground. He has his own code of ethics: “I focus on old walls. I don’t trash walls, I make them better,” he says. Alias says he first visited India in 2014 for the street art festival St+Art India in Delhi. Although he stayed for three months, he decided to return because he felt he had not seen enough of the country. Curious about Auroville from what he heard from friends and read, he made up his mind to visit, and ended up staying for almost a month. “It was in January 2016. My friend Tona (Hamburg-based street artist) was part of an artist residence at the Dune Eco Group near Auroville. We had already travelled together in Varanasi. I decided to spend some time doing street art interventions in Auroville, before taking a flight to Port Blair,” he says. Although his body of work in Auroville is relatively small — just about 10 paste-ups — it’s significant, as he’s focussed on some of his strongest pieces. “I did only a few paste-ups because I didn’t want to travel with my stencil map and spray cans in 36C. This trip, for me, was about travelling, to take photos. And spend some time at the beach!” His most haunting work, perhaps, is the image of a sombre boy sitting on a live bomb. “I think the motif is from 2008, but I’m not sure. Later, I made the bomb into an image of the globe. This motif was created from image processing. The message is self-explanatory.” Street Art Smart Tag: A stylised name or signature done freehand with a marker or aerosol spray can. Childstyle: Work intentionally done like a kid’s painting. Wildstyle: Intricate, elaborate, interlocking letters or symbols used when tagging. Stencil: A design cut into cardboard, and then spray-painted onto a wall.

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