Watch This Space

The global ambitions of Invader's street art.

- By Lauren Collins. Photographs by Lou Escobar

The ground was squelchy, leading the mind to wonder what sort of organic matter was decomposing underfoot. A topsoil of potato-chip bags and soda cans disturbed the silence that Invader and his accomplice, Mr. Blue, were trying to preserve. It was 1:03 A.M. on a Wednesday in midJuly. They had parked their van nearby, and were picking their way down an overgrown service path that led to a sliver of land alongside the A4 highway, just past the eastern limit of Paris.

“Flatten yourself against the wall if a car comes,” Invader told me.

He wriggled past a phantasmagorical fern.

“You always get some crazy plants, with all the carbon dioxide from the cars,” he said.

Our destination was a forty-foot-high concrete pillar that supported a smaller road passing over the A4. Traf fic raced by at eighty miles an hour. Invader rummaged in the underbrush, trying to find a pair of polypropylene supermarket totes, filled with supplies, that Mr. Blue had tossed out of the van on an earlier run past the site. Mr. Blue, meanwhile, was wrestling with a telescopic ladder. He extended it and propped it against the pillar while Invader, kneeling, laid out a series of panels made from fifteen-centimetre-square tiles. They were labelled A1, A2, A3, A4, Bi, B2, B3, and B4.

“Tt’s like a bank robbery,” he had said a few minutes before. I know exactly how everything needs to go.”