Hello. My name is BNE. I am a graffiti writer. I started writing my name in the streets when I was a teenager in the 90’s. I covered the city with my tag and then worked my way across the country. As the years passed I traveled the world and covered a large part of the earth with my logo, learning different languages and cultures along the way.
Before long, I had created a globally recognized brand that offered no product or service. To me this is art. My work has also amounted to what is basically a multi-million dollar international ad campaign. The campaign has reached millions of people and has awed some of the world’s largest ad agencies.
As my fame grew, I started getting a lot of offers from individuals and companies looking to use my life’s work to advertise whatever they had to sell. They were truly greedy, selfish people who did not care about me, graffiti culture, or anything else other than profits. Encountering these people only added to my already growing disgust of human greed. That disgust would ultimately push me towards my true calling.
I realized that with my art I had a global voice and not to use it for good would be a waste. I needed to use this brand that I created to make some sort of positive social change.
In my travels, I have been to some of the world’s poorest slums and have seen the extreme poverty and horrible injustices that billions of people suffer through. After a lot of thought, over one year of research, and a chance encounter with a poor Indonesian woman, I concluded to what I could do that would have the biggest impact on poverty. Providing clean water and sanitation solutions to people in developing countries is what really needs to be done.
Fully motivated, I had to figure out how I was going to help make a difference. Since I am an expert in guerrilla marketing and advertising, spreading the word is the relatively easy part. The main challenge would be actually raising money.
I’ve always thought that it was a shame that there are so many artists around the world and we have never all tried to unite for a single cause. I have come up with a way for us to do that and its actually pretty simple and very doable. All it takes for us to save millions of lives is for each one of us to donate one work of art and recruit two of our peers to do the same. Gradually the movement will spread throughout the entire art community around the world. The Artists 4 Water project will raise millions of dollars to fight the world water crisis and save millions of lives. Each contributing artist’s talent and influence will also raise awareness and help bring worldwide attention to our cause.
Graffiti’s original purpose was to give a voice to the voiceless. There are billions of people living in poverty with no voice at all. I want to let all my fellow graffiti writers and artists know that if we simply lend our voices to these people, we CAN change the world.
Not all of us are artists or art collectors and I want everyone to be able to be a part of this movement. So, in addition to traditional donation based fundraising methods, I decided to create a line of BNE products to energize people and spread the word even further. 100% of profits from these products will be used to cover our expenses and fund clean water projects. Supporters can get involved by simply buying something that they would normally buy anyway. This gives people an effective but not invasive way to rally around this important cause. BNE products will raise money, create awareness, and further challenge consumers to think about what or who is actually behind a brand. Everyday, consumers are waking up, they are starting to think about who they are actually giving their money to. People are growing more aware and are beginning to demand more from companies. In the future all brands will have to start actually caring, instead of just creating the illusion that they do.
BNE is no longer about me as an artist. It has become a voice for the victims of social injustice who have no voice. BNE is a movement with supporters from all walks of life all over the world, and we are growing everyday.
Join us and be apart of something REAL.
If we don’t this then who will?
Peace & Love
-BNE
I was painting my name on a wall with a can of silver paint when an older woman with only one tooth who spoke decent English came up to me and asked what I was doing. I could see years of hard times in her eyes. I told her that I was painting my name and she said that “it must be nice to be able to just spray money into the air” and went on to say that if she had paint she could make the old fence in front of her shack look brand new. She had a point. I had some more cans so we painted the fence together and when we finished I couldn’t believe how happy she was. She never asked me for money or anything beyond painting the fence she just wanted to talk. She lived right in front of a filthy brown river full of garbage and eventually the conversation turned towards water. As we talked I learned that people in the neighborhood used to get water from a well but it had been broken for a while. She often had to go without food because she spent most of her money buying water from street sellers. Even with the well, water had to be boiled so residents spent a large chunk of their salaries on kerosene. After our conversation she thanked me for the fence and we parted ways.
I left Jakarta the next day and started doing a lot of research on water. The more I read I realized that there was nothing more important than water, this is what I really needed to focus on. A few months later I decided to go back to Indonesia and just set this off with my own money. A good friend of mine with a lot of connects lived in Jakarta and was down to come on board.
BNE
This song is fitting...
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