LIFE ARCHIVES
ANDREAS MORPHIS Age: 24 years old , 11 / May / 1994 Sex: Male Nationality: Cypriot Place of Residence: Cyprus
ABOUT ME F R I DAY 2 01 9 / 1 7 : 4 6 P M / A P R I L
So Andreas, tell me a bit about yourself.
So you really like exploring in your life?
You used to be a rebel then?
I am a graphic designer, i just finished university a year ago and i’m currently working at an advertising company in Limassol, Cyprus. On my free time I really enjoy doing graffiti, something that I started doing from a young age. Basically graffiti is my life, it is how i ended up being a graphic designer! On the way I started doing graffiti jobs and got paid for it, so at the moment I got it as a second job. I also really love latin dancing. A year ago I started taking latin dance classes which eventually became a passion of mine. I also like travelling, seeing new places, new designs that inspire me for my work and getting to know other cultures. Exactly! I love adventures! When I was younger I used to sneak out at night and do graffiti. Something that I still do sometimes! You could say that yeah!
AN ANGRY YOUTH T H U R S DAY 2 0 0 0 / 1 1 : 2 7 P M / S E P T E MB E R
Tell me about a memory of yours of when you were young.
When I was in primary school I started gaining weight, because my grandmother used to own a grocery store and I really loved sweets! It was a dream come true for a kid to have unlimited amounts of candy! At a point I realised that I got really fat, at school some respected that and didn’t say anything about it and others used to “bully” me, as we refer to today. When I was younger there wasn’t such thing as bullying, it was refered to as making fun of someone. So since I was a rebellious kid and didn’t like being pushed around, whenever somebody came to make fun of me about my weight I used to beat him up. So eventually it became from defending myself to beating up people just for talking to me. For example when I did something wrong and someone came and told me “why would you do that” I used to beat him up.
All this turned to anger then?
Exactly. So from something bad eventually it became something pleasant because I enjoyed beating up people. Now that I think about it, it wasn’t something nice.. people being afraid to even talk to me. But yeah, it was both.
There was the ones who deserved it and the ones who didn’t.
Well, yeah. And I still agree with it. When we see now all those kids being bullied and commiting suicide, one thing that i would have advised them is to beat up those who bully them.
MY HOBBY WE D NE S DAY 2 01 1 / 01 : 3 0 P M / M A R C H How about a pleasant or unpleasant memory of yours? Whichever you prefer.
As I said before my hobby is graffiti. Basically graffiti is my whole life. One day I picked up a friend of mine who was part of a “graffiti crew” that and we used to paint together. So we were supposed to do a graffiti at a roundabout at night, we were around 16 years old so we started going by foot since we were too young to have a drivers licence or a car. As we were walking we were sticking stickers on the walls, we signed walls or “bombing” them and so we got close to the roundabout. Then a car appear which looked like a modified vehicle with some bearded guys inside. They rolled down the window and asked us “What are you up to boys?”. We just gave them a look without saying anything and we continued going our way. Then they did a U-turn in an instant and they stopped right in front of us and jumped out of the car. They was four of them if i remember correctly and they were 2 meters in height! “We are the CID” they told us, I thought to my self “We’re fucked”. They asked us “What do you got in your bags?”. My friend said that we had clothes, then I thought to myself again “Okay, now we’re really fucked!”. They made us open up the bags and there was around 15 spray cans, so they asked us what we were up to and where we were going. “What do you need the spray cans for then?” they asked us. We told them that we were at a friends house and we were painting. “You’re not members of the football teams that go around and vandalise everything right?” they asked us. And of course we said no and that we had nothing to do with those groups. Then they asked us to show them our hands, whenever I was painting I had the habit of always wearing plastic gloves so my hands were totally clean. I couldn’t really say the same for my buddy because his hands were pitch black! Without saying anything else they put us in the car and took us to the central station. They put us in the lobby and told us “Wait here and we’ll come and get your testimony”. “What do you mean you’ll get our testimony? We did nothing wrong!”. And his answer was that they saw us, which was a lie! So we waited for a long time and as the time passed by we got very nervous, we were very young and didn’t quite understand what was happening at the time. Then they got our fingerprints and pictures and made a police record. At a point they asked us of our home address. I always had a problem with that cause I could never remember it! The police officer said “Call your mum and find out then!”. I didn’t have much of a choice so I called my mum. It was 3 in the morning as I recall . My mother picks up the phone and I asked her “Hey mum, what’s our home address?!” and she asked me “Why? Did you get picked up by the police?”. I told her not to worry and that I would fix things up. So I tell him my home address and they told us that we were free to go. I asked him “What about our spray cans? You got our whole bags!”. They told us those will be confiscated. Though the problem was that the bag that the spray cans were inside was my schoolbag! We convinced them to at least give us the bags back and they released us. Since the central police station was downtown and it was 4 in the morning we had no one to pick us up so we asked a police officer to take as home and he did. Now if this is a good or bad experience it’s up to anyone to decide!
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JULY 13
1996
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SPLIT PERSONALITY
M O NDAY 1 9 9 8 / 2 0 : 1 9 P M / F E B R UA RY
Do you have an experience that changed you in a way?
Have you ever overcome this fact?
An experience that changed me was when my parents got divorced when I was 4 years old. A little bit before i turned 4 i began to understand the fighting, the arguements, my father leaving the house... And what they told me was that it was better for me to not grow up in such an environment. How it changed me though was that I had to be with each parent every week. That meant that I had to pack my things so that I could stay with my father on the weekends and with my mother on weekdays. As well as I had to go to school and because of my mother working I had to go to my grandparents after school. So in a way I had 3 homes, but in the end I had none. None of them I felt as a home. So with all this going on I eventually made some friends from my grandparents neighbourhood. There was a park close to my grandparents house which I used to pass most of the time with my friends. So on weekdays after school, I went home to have lunch and then I used to get on my bicycle and ride to the park. At the beggining it was really fun but then as we got older things changed. I was hanging out at the park until I was 20 years old. Some of our friends started doing drugs, others started stealing. I was never into those things, yeah I kind of liked the feeling of doing something “illegal” but at a point. But since we were like a team, if somebody did something bad then we were all to blame. Sometimes the neighbours would go and ask my grandfather “Does your grandkid hang out with the scumbags? How did it come to this?”. This started changing me in the sense of being more rebellious and independent. Since I was into graffiti as well i became more reckless and ignorant, I didn’t really care about the police. I didn’t care about what anyone would say about me, I became more reactive and in general what became of the divorce was me having a split personality, it was my personality of me at the park, and my other personality towards my family. That was because I was trying to not be the same person as the one at the park but no matter how much I tried it was still affected by that. So in conclussion what happened was that I was left homeless. Well, no. I can’t really say that I got over it but I surely understood it. I always get this feeling from time to time of why should it be like this and not be “normal”. Of course there are families that may have a much rougher situation going on but that is what I got and what I always thought about. I never really realised it but I understood and respected it, I still have a big why in my head though.
MY TATTOO Do you have any scars on you that remind you of something?
Would you change anything on this tattoo? Let’s say better styling of letters or not having it at all?
Yeah, when I was younger I got a tattoo of my graffiti nickname. Most of my friends told me not to do it and that I won’t like and that I’ll get sick of it eventually. It didn’t matter to me how good or ugly it looked, yes the letters look awful because at that time we didn’t have any idea of that type of tattoos but the fact of the matter is the message. It reminds me of past when I would sneak out and do graffitis, it reminds me of who I was, how i started and who I’ve become. Well if I could think then as I think now, I would go to the same tattoo artist and ask him to make the exact same tattoo as I got now. I wouldn’t change anything because it is not about looking nice or ugly, it’s about the history it carries.
THE bEATDOwn S AT U R DAY 2 01 2 / 1 7 : 2 5 P M / A P R I L
Tell me about an experience that scarred you.
I was in the army, it was in 2012 on my first year. It was Easter and I went to the park where I used to hang out and where the “Lampratzia” was. So the others told that they were waiting for another gang to come for a beatdown. There were many people gathered at the park with bats and big wooden sticks. I wasn’t that type of guy so I decided to use my bare hands. So we stayed there and waited for a long time, I didn’t really believe them because this kind of situation where a gang would “arrange” a beatdown with another gang often occurred but usually nobody showed up. So there we stood and in front of us appeared around 30 people marching towards us. I was on the front line with 2 other guys and I was the oldest of us three. I was around 18 at the time. The other two guys next to me were around 16 and 14. The others that were acting as the tough guys and as such were all behind us. I didn’t turn around at the point to see what was happening because there were 30 guys in front of me ready to for a war! So as the others approached us with bats and stuff I waited for a bit and then started walking towards them, I thought the others were behind us so I didn’t turn around. We got close to 2 meters approximately and I started running towards them. The first guy I encountered I threw on the ground and started punching him. Within 5 seconds I was the one on the ground with 5 people beating the crap out of me! I couldn’t react because one of them was specifically hitting me on the head. Each time he would hit me I got dizzy and I couldn’t react, the first thought I had was “Where are the rest of us? Why are 5 people beating me since we were that many as well?”. After a very short time I realised that there wasn’t any of the others with us. It was just me with the other 2 guys getting beaten up. So I thought to myself “I have to get up and leave somehow so that I won’t get killed!”. And that thought got me really scared. So I started to grab stuff from the floor without watching and and ended up holding something that I don’t even remember what it was. So with that I was able to back them off and run away. Nobody run after me so I was able to get away and I watched them leave. Then I saw the other two guys that were next to me lying on the floor. The two of us were just bruised up, but the other guy got a hit on the head and had blool on him and all around him. As I stood there and watched him bleeding I started questioning myself, “Is this for real? I’m dreaming of this incident?”. I tried to understand because that stuff only happened in the movies! He wasn’t dying, the skin was just torn up but it was a really scary thing to watch. Then the “rest of us” appeared and picked him up and took him to the hospital and the neighbours had called the police. So I left the scene and went home and I got a call from my friends telling me not to go to the hospital because the police was there arresting people for the incident. So there I was, beaten up and unable to go to the hospital so that I won’t get arrested. My mum started crying as soon as she saw me, my face was all bruised up and swollen and my back full of scars. I couldn’t even move! So I stayed at home and called my aunt which is a doctor and she told us to do some techniques and especially to not go to sleep at night. There I was awake all night long, thinking about what happened. The more I thought about it the more scared i got. This was my worst experience ever since if those guys had hit me some millimeters lower I could be handicapped or dead now.
Do you have any scars on you from this incident?
I used to have many on my back but they healed over time and dissapeared.
A TRIP TO PRISON M O NDAY 2 01 2 / 1 4 : 1 1 P M / F E B R UA RY
Any bad desicions you made that you don’t regret?
Once I didn’t stop when a police officer tried to pull me over. What happened was that, it was Green Monday and we had a family dinner. I was 17 years old and i told my mum that i would move the car to the other side of the house. So i moved the car to the back side of the house and as soon as I parked I had the idea of driving to the park. “Somebody would be there to hang out for a while.” I thought at the time. I went there and a friend of mine which also had a car suggested that we should go for a ride. Three guys in his car and three in mine and we took off for a ride. As we got close to the roundabout my friend that was driving the other car asked me if I wanted to race him. “Why not!” I replied and there we where racing between roundabouts which was a distance of about 1 or 2 kilometers apart. As we were racing we noticed a police block of 3 cars and 2 bikes. They were probably doing alcohol tests. My friend which was in front of me got signaled to pull over and he avoided the police and continued driving. I had about half a second to decide what to do. Shall I pull over while I was racing with two other people in the car without any drivers licence or car insurance? Or risk it and drive on while hoping that I would get away. Of course I decided not to stop and immediately thought of a spot where theres farms and It’s difficult to drive to and the only way to know about it was to be local. So I decided to go there. I went to the next roundabout and didn’t even check if there was any other vehicle crossing at the moment, I just went on. I didn’t even realise that the police were so fast that they were already behind me! It was approximately 5 to 10 minutes later that I realised when checked my back and to my surprise I saw 3 police cars and 1 SUV from the CID up in our asses! As soon as I saw them i started cutting corners and driving in narrow streets in hopes that I could confuse them a bit since I didn’t have the vehicle number plates on and the windows were black tinted, I assumed that they wouldn’t be able to find me if I somehow managed to get away. 30 minutes into the chase we were 2 blocks away from where i lived. To get to the next block there was 3 connecting
roads so I thought that I had to go close to where I lived. I tried to turn from the first connecting road and i saw car coming out of the parking so I couldn’t stop and wait for the car to leave because the police would have caught me and I moved on to the next connecting road where it became a construction site and I couldn’t drive past it! My only choice then was the third and last connecting road where civilians were trying to cross and I couldn’t stop driving. I had two choices, either run them over or get another turn which was leading where I was before and right in front of a police station. 40 minutes into the chase, my friend with the other car was in front of me driving and so I tried to signal him to go straight so that I could turn back in hopes of making the police follow him and letting me get away. We managed to split up and as the road took me to the police station I noticed that they had blocked the road with a police car. I was forced to stop and got out of the vehicle. The police officer then started swearing at me and I couldn’t talk back to him. My co-driver tried talking back at him and got beaten up so I thought to myself “Okay, just shut up and we’ll see what happens”. So they handcuffed us and took us to the police station. As I recall they took a statement from the others and they took me to the offices. They wouldn’t stop swearing and they opened up the computer and started to record my credentials. As soon as they noticed my other 2 files from the graffiti incidents they told me that i would have a “fun” time. And so they left me in the offices and left. After a while, I went up to the reception and the officer asked me if I was attending a masquerade party since I was wearing my wolf slippers and a bob marley pair of sweatpants. I said no and goodbyed the officer and he asked me where I was going and I replied home! He told me to sit down and wait cause they were coming over to take me to jail! I asked him, “So it’s not over?” and he said “No, they’re taking your car apart as we speak”.
I assumed that they thought I was carrying drugs or anything illegal but the truth was that I was just feeling like it at the time. A pajero shows up and I was feeling humiliated because everyone could see me inside the car so I was crouching the whole time. They took me to jail and got my credentials and statement again and said that if I wanted i could call my parents and inform them of the situation. And so I did. I was taken to get a pillow and a mattres that was filthy and stinking of piss and afterwards i got transfered to a cell. I wasn’t given any sheets and it was cold at the time. So there I was in a cell, with no notice of when i was being released and I couldn’t sleep because it was cold and the bed was filthy. By the way, I had to go to school the day after! It was around 5 in the evening after being held for about 3 - 4 hours that they came and told me that my parents came to visit. I was expecting them to be angry at me about what happened but surprusingly they told me that it was going to be fine and that it’s okay and that I didn’t have to worry
about anything. After they left I felt really sad because I caused my parents to be sad and scared for me over a stupid decision I made. When it dawned they brought me food and a police officer came and sat with me in the cell and asked me about what happened. He told me that it’s nothing and that everything was going to be okay. Then he asked me if I was smoking and I said no and he replied “You won’t sleep, you won’t eat and you won’t smoke, how are you going to pass the night?!”. And that’s when I panicked and realised that I was going to spend the night in jail. That’s when I told him to roll me a cigarette so that I could pass the night. There I was with my new “buddy” having a chat and smoking cigarettes. Anyway I couldn’t sleep at night because as I said before the bed was filthy, it was cold and i was constantly sitting, standing and walking around my cell because of all the stress while recalling my choices. Now I’m somehow happy that I didn’t stop in the first place because now I have this story to talk about!
I WOULDN’T CHANGE ANYTHING FROM MY PAST. NEITHER THE STUPID OR THE ILLEGAL THINGS I DID, BUT THE ONLY THING THAT IT’S NOT REALLY MY DECISION TO MAKE IS THAT IF COULD I WOULD PREVENT MY PARENTS FROM GETTING DIVORCED. BECAUSE AS I SAID IT IS SOMETHING THAT HAS SCARRED ME UNTIL NOW.