Representative of Italian street art, Yama began painting in the mid-1990s, inspired by the strongly growing graffiti movement in the United States. Immediately, Yama sought to free himself from American aesthetic languages to seek a new Italian one.

Because of his understanding of street art, Yama found his greatest source of inspiration in Futurism, in the works of Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni. Yama defines Futurism as a predecessor of street art. The two artistic movements were similar in many aspects as they moved beyond the pictorial style and they both very successfully predicted the future.