Icelandic Graffiti
Perhaps surprisingly to Americans, urban Iceland is filled with grafitti. And not just the equivalent of "Ragnar Was Here" scrawled in Sharpie marker; there are creative tags, stickers, cartoons and intricate spraycan piece works. Maybe it's just that our associations are with African American hip-hop culture, "the hood", and visions of densely-populated terminal urban sprawl, all of which are decidedly lacking. It probably shouldn't be a shock, as graffiti is huge in Europe...though other major European cities feature the ethnic ghettos, overpopulation, restlessness and economic uncertainty that Americans associate with "outlaw art."
Grafitti is a common sight in alcoves and alleyways in Reykjavik and on barns and other buildings en route to Keflavik. It often even crops up in odd places on residential buildings. Some of the most interesting "graff" in Reykjavik is in the center city area, off Lagurvedur in passageways, courtyards and parking lots and on the backs of buildings, where sometimes whole walls are covered in murals Brooklyn or Queens style. We were not there for a graffiti phototour, so documentation is sparse, but it's worth a look for hip, ex-tagger types in the city.
We're not sure who we're about to make meta-famous, but one of the more amusing tags we repeatedly came across was this cat. This one was spotted on the side of a building north off Lagurvedur. Here's another at Tjörnin ("the Pond"). Here is an actual Icelandic cat spotted near the tag at Tjörnin. Compare and contrast.
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