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street art
It's hard to know where to begin with experiences of Bogotá, so I'm going to just launch right in with street art. It was everywhere. We passed this mural every day:
Any surface could have something beautiful painted on it:
There was ordinary tagging, too, of course, plus quickly scrawled political messages, like this one, on the headquarters of the newspaper El Tiempo (Without democratization of the media there is no peace!):
We were eager to go on the Bogotá graffiti tour, which is held twice daily.
Our day, it was led by Jeff, who, despite that American-sounding name, is a Colombian anthropologist with a deep love of graffiti. He knows so much about the artists, their history, and the history of Colombia--which is relevant for a lot of the art.
Jeff
The artist who goes by the name of DjLu often does stencils of the faces of real people, with the message "juega siempre" somewhere in the art. He's also famous for doing insects whose wings are guns, representing the fact that violence spreads like an insect-borne disease, and for pineapple hand grenades.
A gunfly
Jeff made an effort to highlight the work of female street artists, like Lili Cuca, who painted this mural:
(You can watch her work in this two-minute YouTube video)
Vertigo Graffiti did four images of the left-wing politician Gaitán, whose assassination in 1948 set off devastating riots.
One artist uses the name Guache, which means "warrior" in the language of the Muisca people who were the original inhabitants of the Bogotá area. Here's art by Guache:
With graffiti and street art, there's always something new. In the time we were there, this bird went up:
This isn't half of what I photographed, but at least it gives a good taste. At least one mural has a special story attached to it, so it'll get its own entry.
Any surface could have something beautiful painted on it:
There was ordinary tagging, too, of course, plus quickly scrawled political messages, like this one, on the headquarters of the newspaper El Tiempo (Without democratization of the media there is no peace!):
We were eager to go on the Bogotá graffiti tour, which is held twice daily.
Our day, it was led by Jeff, who, despite that American-sounding name, is a Colombian anthropologist with a deep love of graffiti. He knows so much about the artists, their history, and the history of Colombia--which is relevant for a lot of the art.
Jeff
The artist who goes by the name of DjLu often does stencils of the faces of real people, with the message "juega siempre" somewhere in the art. He's also famous for doing insects whose wings are guns, representing the fact that violence spreads like an insect-borne disease, and for pineapple hand grenades.
A gunfly
Jeff made an effort to highlight the work of female street artists, like Lili Cuca, who painted this mural:
(You can watch her work in this two-minute YouTube video)
Vertigo Graffiti did four images of the left-wing politician Gaitán, whose assassination in 1948 set off devastating riots.
One artist uses the name Guache, which means "warrior" in the language of the Muisca people who were the original inhabitants of the Bogotá area. Here's art by Guache:
With graffiti and street art, there's always something new. In the time we were there, this bird went up:
This isn't half of what I photographed, but at least it gives a good taste. At least one mural has a special story attached to it, so it'll get its own entry.
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I love that there is a graffiti tour. It clearly rewards the walking.
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That's especially wonderful.
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Nice cats!
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And the gunwing insects are haunting.
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If you ever come over to Belfast, I highly recommend the street art tour here. Ours changes a little more slowly, but it's also quite rich (some photos I took). They invite street artists from around the world to add more at a festival every year. Note there is a distinction the artists themselves make between their street art and between NI's tradition of murals, which are...different.
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