Beyond walls : rethinking, graffiti aesthetics, and politics in Bogota

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Beyond

Rethinking, Graffiti

Walls

Aesthetics, and Politics

In Bogotá

Fenna Smits [6284140]

University of Amsterdam

Graduate School of Social Sciences

Social Sciences Research Master

Specialization: Globalization, Flows, and Localities

Supervisor: Mattijs van de Port

Second reader: Amade M’charek

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all the people in Bogotá who opened up their lives for me. It goes without saying that without them there would not have been any story to be told. Luisa, Lucas, Wilson, and Camilo, it was a great honour to work together with you. Thank you for let me take part in the project Museo Libre. But most of all, I want to thank you for a good time and your friendship. Cest, I want to thank you for your contagious enthusiasm about this project. I admire your unstoppable energy and discipline in practicing graffiti the way you like it best. Thank you for your friendship; it was a pleasure to spend time with you. Jesús, thank you for introducing me to San Cristóbal and the work you and the collective are doing there. I feel privileged to have been there and got to know such wonderful projects and people in San Cristóbal. Deka and Luisa, I absolutely envy your perseverance in contributing to a more just world. Thank you for let me take part in the project Fortuleza del Montaña and for the subsequent discussion about the video we had afterward. I also like to thank the members of Atempo, especially Matteo and Tatiana, to take me on board with the project Entre Árboles.

I want to thank Alba for the numerous discussions we had on the topic of graffiti in Bogotá, for introducing me to helpful contacts, and for always be willing to help me out. It was a privilege to have someone experienced like you by my side during the research and I cannot wait to read your dissertation. July, Marcela, Alba and, Erica Bogotá would not have been as much fun without you. Thank you for providing a warm home away from home, for the adventures we had, and the laughter we shared. I am sure we will meet again. Marco, you too, I like to thank for the fun nights out and helping me out with the translations for the video Fortaleza de la Montaña. Who would have thought we would meet in Colombia while

attending the same university in Amsterdam?

I want to thank Mattijs van de Port, Amade M'charek, and Marleen de Witte, who have taught me new ways of seeing the world around us and stimulated me to think out-of-the-box. Mattijs, besides thanking you for taking the time to read every chapter and supplying me with insightful comments, I like to thank you for the years of inspiration. It was because of your creative classes and inspiring ideas that my interest in ethnographic research was triggered. Marleen and Amade, I like to thank both of you for sharing your insights with me. Many of my ideas for the research have been formed in dialogues we had in the small-scale classes. I am also indebted to Hilbert Kamphuisen, who has taught me so many valuable things about filming. I heard your voice in my head while editing. And I like to thank

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Annemarie de Wildt for being interested in my ‘stories from the field’ and for letting me share them with a Dutch public.

Likewise, I am indebted to my fellow students who have contributed to this thesis by commenting on multiple drafts. I want to thank you for the enriching discussions we had. It was through these discussions that my ideas crystallized in solid form. But most of all, I really enjoyed the time we had together.

And then, of course, I am grateful to my friends and family at home for their support throughout this research project. Anouk, David, Nanne and Matthijs thank you all for taking the time to read parts of this thesis and to make it as readable as it is now. I like to thank my parents and my sister for always supporting me in what I do and for providing such a warm and serene workplace. I want to thank Justine, Anouk, and Nanne, for bearing my six months of absence in the house and for the uncountable moments of distraction when I was writing this thesis. Joosje and Laurynas I want to thank for making the library a less boring (and sometimes even fun) place. Bas, I want to thank you for enduring my absence, even when I was there, and for always reminding me about the pleasures of everyday life.

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1

Introduction

What is it that street art ‘does’ when it is made ‘out there’ on the walls of Bogotá? With that research question in mind I decided to travel to the capital of Colombia. A rather vague question, so much was understood. I hoped it would allow me to enter ‘the field’ with an open mind, free of preconceived definitions. Yet, like all fairy tales my fantasy of

‘open-mindedness’ covered up a reality of pre-conceived assumptions and expectations. What did I know about graffiti, before deciding on it to be the subject of my master thesis? Not much. Almost nothing would be a more honest way of putting it. When I told people in Amsterdam about my research some enthusiastically listed their favourite graffiti artists. Most of the times I had never heard of them. So what had triggered my interest in graffiti in Bogotá?

Three things can be pointed out. First, my overall interest to ‘tell the world’ always moved back and forth between ‘intellectual’ apprehensions (like anthropology) and forms of expression that are, in my perception, more ‘creative’. When I started to follow courses that promised a ‘visual anthropology’ I hoped that an alliance between film and anthropology would offer me the balance I was looking for. Consequently when I visited Bogotá the first time as a tourist and observed the enormous amount of large-size murals on the walls of the city, things suddenly seemed to come together. Excitedly I imagined filming the production of these impressive graffiti while probing into the thoughts, dreams and practices of the people who made them.

Second, Colombia as a research site fitted my interest in what is called in the literature ‘a post-conflict’ situation. What does it do to people to live with a history marked by political violence and conflict? Convinced about the anthropological insight that socio-historical context is an inescapable constitutive baggage off those living in the present, I was intrigued to find out how this proliferation of large-size murals would be related to this ‘post-conflict’ situation.

And third, I have been heavily influenced by contemporary literature that probes the political dimension of artistic practices (Sansi, 2015; Rancière, 2009; Mouffe, 2007). These scholars have argued that contemporary artistic practices are intrinsically social and political. They have reimagined the politics of arts in such a way that pushes the boundaries of modern political theory and urge for rethinking what politics is, or should be.

Thus, not surprisingly, and notwithstanding my ‘open mind’, I ended up studying graffiti projects that had a social and political component. Community graffiti projects,

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2 graffiti as protest, and graffiti projects raising awareness of social issues had become my research sites.

However, what I like to emphasize in this introduction is that it could have been otherwise. Whereas I encountered grafiteros that explicitly identified as artists, performed social work, and enacted political objectives, the multiplicity of graffiti practices could have directed me to grafiteros involved in illegal tagging, working in galleries or operating on an international scale. Moreover, most people involved in graffiti pass through multiple worlds, practice various sorts of graffiti, and switch from talking about themselves in terms of grafiteros, muralistas, or simply artistas.1 Therefore, I will make a case against defining graffiti in terms of what it is and what it is not, and suggest instead studying the practices of those that claim to practice what they perceive as (something like) graffiti.

In what follows, I will invite the reader to be introduced to these multiple worlds in which graffiti circulates, and of which I only studied parts. Following this short ‘tour’, I will set out how people attempt to define the practice and plea for a study of graffiti beyond defining its borders. I will do this by elaborating a critique on the current trend in graffiti studies to produce divisions of the social worlds we study and the subsequent narrow

understanding of art in terms of representation. I will outline my approach to graffiti, based on this critique, which focuses on practice instead of representation. To conclude this

introduction I will go into some methodological reflections on doing research as a filming anthropologist and discuss the chapters that comprise my thesis.

Graffiti—not one but many things.

During my fieldwork in Bogotá, I wrote blogs for the Amsterdam museum. Coincidently they had organized an exhibition about Graffiti in Amsterdam and New York around the same time of my fieldwork and were therefore interested in some ‘stories from the field’ situated in Bogotá. This collaboration signifies that graffiti has become an object of interest for museums. The movement from the streets to the museum is certainly not particular to

Amsterdam. In Bogotá, like in Amsterdam, graffiti circulated both in the streets and in private spaces, such as galleries, museums, or ateliers. During my fieldwork, I encountered graffiti sprayed on all sorts of walls, doors, and lampposts, as well as on neatly demarcated

1_{In this thesis I will switch, likewise, between naming my friends and informants ‘graffiti artists’,}

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3 canvasses, posters, t-shirts, caps, and stylized wallpapers. Graffiti featured in dodgy streets, as well as in fashionable edgy clubs, community centres, and private bedrooms.

It was my friend Alex who introduced me to this multiplicity of graffiti worlds. Alex calls himself an artist. To articulate this label he always appeared in battered clothes covered with paint spatters. I met Alex when I visited an abandoned house, seized with the consent of the owner by approximately hundred graffiti artists. Within three months the deserted space was transformed into a dazzling graffiti gallery. Not one facet of the house, not even the toilets and windows, were left untouched by the artists. Paintings entangled each other, flowed over, and even surpassed other images and depictions. This house of graffiti, that defied any attempt of ordering, resembled in nothing with the other gallery space Alex showed me, besides that it hosted the work of the same artists.

Lavamoatumba. Photo by Fenna Smits

Take the gallery called El Antídoto [The Antidote]. Alex insisted on paying my

entrance to the Victorian style building in which this gallery is hosted. We entered a well-kept patio furnished with green plants and entered a spacious round entrance hall that gave way to

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4 multiple side rooms and an old-fashioned English spiral staircase. The high clinical white walls accentuated the dark wooden parquet and provided the surface for exhibiting a handful of framed canvasses. Alex urged me to take a look upstairs and pay the upper left room a visit. Here I encountered his paintings, neatly framed on canvas, characterized by the use of intense colours and the fascinating mixture of animal, deity, and human elements. A tiny sign gave away the artists name ‘Nice Naranja’ and the price of 5000.000 Colombian Pesos [1450 euros]

Canvas Nice Naranja2

I also encountered Alex in another space. A trendy but edgy bar in the centre of Bogotá had organized an artistic event under the heading Arte Accesible [accessible art]. On thin layers of paper, graffiti artists displayed their work, alongside musical performers, and illustrators. Young elegant men and women dressed in the latest trendy outfits strolled along the exhibited works after which they stayed around with a martini or a ‘club Colombian’ beer. I could not help but wonder ironically how art can be made accessible if only a small minority of Bogotá's city dwellers can afford the high priced drinks. I even had to make a bigger effort to imagine my graffiti friends from the Southern, and highly marginalized, part of town ‘hanging out’ here, appreciating art while sipping a martini. Not that they would hesitate to exhibit their work in gallery spaces instead of on the streets (they participate in exhibitions in their own neighbourhood). But this world of edgy galleries in the centre of the city is

geographically and economically too distanced from the overall peripheral and poor South. And then, unavoidably, graffiti is everywhere on the streets. Tags, throw-ups, bombings, murals, letters and pieces are just some of the terms used by graffiti artists to

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5 define their painting activities on the streets. This, Alex reassured me after our visit to the gallery that hosted his work, is the ‘real’ gallery. ‘Bogotá is one big outdoor gallery. There's always more to see. At night, a whole new gallery opens up when the shops close their doors and windows.’ When the shutters go down, indeed, a whole new repertoire of graffiti reveals itself.

Arte Accesible. Photo by Fenna Smits

Graffiti in Bogotá is not one but many things. Its symbols and practices circulate through multiple worlds and in each world graffiti is qualified differently. It therefore intrigued me that despite the, or maybe because of this, multiplicity people are constantly attempting to delineate the practice. What ‘really’ counts as graffiti, and whether graffiti can be used interchangeably with terms such as street art, arte urbano, or arte público, is subject to heavy debates in Bogotá's public sphere. Grafiteros, administrators, tourist, mayors, police, academics, gallery owners, city dwellers- rich and poor, all have a say about graffiti, and what it ought to be.

On a popular Bogotan news channel a special item was made in which they addressed the artistic status of graffiti: ‘Grafitis, ¿arte o vandalismo?’ A reporter questioned the upper-class lady as well as the homeless city dweller, while confronting them with a wall covered in

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6 tags and inscriptions. 3 ‘What do you think, is graffiti art or vandalism?’ For once, these opposite characters shared a common opinion: ‘to me, this is pure vandalism.’ Likewise, both responded with an enthusiastic praising of the artistic qualities when confronted with an elaborated mural.

This division of graffiti into a good and a bad practice pertained on the institutional level as well. Since 2012, after a violent incident in which a policeman shot a sixteen-year-old boy, ‘mistaking’ the spray can for a gun, graffiti has become a constitutional concern. In Article 2 of the dictate 75, ‘by which the artistic and responsible practice of graffiti in the city is promoted’, graffiti is defined as:

All forms of temporary urban artistic or cultural expressions, among which one encounters inscriptions, drawings, illustrations, streaks, or similar techniques which one realizes in the public space of the city, which in any case do not content

commercial messages, nor references to any type of label, logo, product or service.4

Two things stand out from this decree. First, graffiti is promoted as a responsible practice. Second, this practice is defined as an artistic and cultural expression. This, in contrast to most European legislation, allows graffiti to be considered as a legal right of expression, rather than as an illegal act of delinquency. However, as stated in the considerations that led to the

decree, the objective of the decree is two folded: to guarantee the exercise of cultural rights and to regulate where graffiti can be practiced and where not. Postulating graffiti as a responsible practice adds to this concern of regulation that some versions of graffiti are allowed whereas others are excluded.

Idartes [the regional institute of arts] is the appointed institution responsible for the implementation of the decree 75. When I spoke with the director in charge of the graffiti projects, Catalina, she made clear that not all graffiti is accepted by the state:

You probably know that in 2011 a policeman shot a grafitero and, well, that has a lot to do with that they sell it like vandalism, not like artists…Well, I mean, they have sprayed me once. I tumbled into a manifestation of minor barristas5 and suddenly one of them

3_{http://www.noticiascaracol.com/colombia/grafitis-arte-o-vandalismo}

4_{Publicado en el Registro Distrital 5071 de febrero 25 de 2013. My translation.}

5_{Barristas is the term used to refer to groups of youths associated with regional football clubs in Colombia.}

These supporters produce club related graffiti. In public opinion they are often associated with (petty) crime and vandalism.

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7 does a graffiti, ‘Ppsssssszz’ [moves with her arm imitating to operate an aerosol spray can], on my car. So, I mean, that's not a grafitero!6

In Catalina's story, the aesthetical of graffiti art is celebrated as a cultural expression. Still, the perceived offensive side of graffiti—the sudden sprays, the bombings, the tags, and hastily written scribble—should be excluded from this celebration. A responsible practice of graffiti is thus cleaned from undesired elements.

Tags. Photo by Fenna Smits

This concern about the ‘real’ nature of graffiti is not something that pertains to Bogotá in particular. Debates about ‘real’ street graffiti and ‘fake’ gallery street art, about ‘real’ art and ‘mere’ bombings and vandalism, take place on a global scale. Take the item written by CNN, in which the author cited a curator to define what graffiti is: ‘"Graffiti is an affirmation of the individual," said Sara Cochran, curator of modern and contemporary [art] at the

Phoenix Art Museum. "The idea of graffiti has a lot to do with raw energy and authenticity."’7 Paradoxically, for some, it is exactly this ‘raw energy’ and ‘authenticity’ that is endangered when graffiti travels to museums and galleries. A blogger on a graffiti website

6_{All quotes of informants that are presented in this thesis were originally in Spanish and translated by myself in}

English.

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8 compared graffiti art in galleries with ‘an embarrassingly sexy mum who smokes pot and listens to Nicki Minaj’ and adds that ‘public galleries just don't get graffiti culture.’8

To elaborate this statement the author drew on an exposition in Paris, where they have exhibited the work of some graffiti artists and excluded, what the author perceived as, ‘hard-core’ graffiti.

And the biggest paradox of all: the only artist left outside the underground coven is Cokney, a hardcore train bomber. His work is presented with police reports, and a photograph, evidence used in a prosecution trial (the artist wound up with a fine of more than 200,000 euros) […] In its context here, the corollary seems to be that graffiti can only be legitimized as art by the authority—legal or cultural. 9

For this author graffiti loses its autonomy when it travels to the galleries and the legitimation of its aesthetic qualities falls under the control of the authorities, instead of the graffiti artists themselves.

Not all graffiti admirers and practitioners, however, agree upon the fact that graffiti in galleries would imply a loss of authenticity. Most of the artists I befriended in Bogotá who practiced graffiti on the streets also participated in exhibitions or produced graffiti

commissioned by companies or individuals. When asked about the difference they mentioned the difference in freedom of choice to depict whatever one imagined, and the difference in the feeling of doing something illegally or legal, but not once did they expressed a sense of loss of the sincerity of the practice.

Likewise, an author who wrote an article for the international digital graffiti platform, ‘Fatcap’, labelled those resisting the movement of graffiti into galleries, ‘purist’ and ‘graffiti traditionalist’. She argued that graffiti is not ‘robbed from its outlaw allure’ when it circulates in galleries, because ‘many street artists continue to create illegally on walls in addition to showing in galleries; and the fact remains that virtually all of the street artists shown in galleries today are self-made and started in the street.’10

A big concern among those that appreciate or practice graffiti is that the artists will ‘fall’ for the commercial rewards of gallery art and will become a ‘sellout’. The (in)famous graffiti artist Banksy is often depicted as the ultimate example of a sellout. In the CNN article

8_{http://www.artslant.com/no/articles/show/40799} 9

http://www.artslant.com/no/articles/show/40799

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9 on graffiti, the author wrote that someone asked Banksy on his website: ‘why are you such a sellout?’ Banksy responded, ‘I wish I had a pound for every time someone asked me that.’11

Rumour even has it that Banksy pays ‘ghost’ writers to put up some of his graffiti on streets around the world. The fear underlying these rumours is that Banksy corrupts his sincere graffiti practices in favour of becoming an unauthentic person only in it for the money.

Graffiti by Stinkfish; produced graffiti on streets as well as for galleries.

Talk about graffiti in academic circles is certainly not exempted from moralistic divisions of graffiti in the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’, ‘the sincere’ and the ‘commoditised’, ‘the raw’ and the ‘polished’. But we should not forget, as Mattijs van de Port has warned us before, that ‘it is not up to the anthropologist to enter qualifications about which is the more “profound” or “authentic”’ (2005: 9). Moreover, I will argue that the border politics in Academia obstruct the study of graffiti in terms of what it ‘does’ in a specific context. In the following paragraph, I will elaborate my critique on the current trend in graffiti studies to divide the ‘real’ from the ‘fake’ and the ‘aesthetic’ from the ‘political’.

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10 Academic border politics: creating divisions

Earlier academic literature treats graffiti as a case of deviant behaviour and sets out to trace the acquisition of fame through name writing (Lachmann, 1988). In this literature, tagging is set apart from murals in the degree of artistic quality and both are analysed comparatively in terms of a strategy of quantity or quality (ibid.). In more recent literature there is a particular desire to ‘delineate the phenomenon’ (Kohn and H. Rosenberg 2013: 626) and define graffiti accordingly in terms of what it is and it is not. Kohn and Rosenberg, for example,

summarized a ‘consensual view’ of graffiti. According to this view graffiti is characterized by the absolute anonymity of the writer/artist, its appearance in the public domain, its subversive character, and by the deviant appearance on a ‘surface not officially designated for writing’ (2013: 612-13).

In Bogotá professor Armando Silva is often consulted to authorize the definition of graffiti. Not only officials and administers recognized Silva as the expert on the topic, but also my informants frequently referred to his books when they reflected upon graffiti. In ‘Graffiti: una Ciudad Imaginada’ Silva (1986) developed an ‘evolution theory’ of graffiti. According to Silva graffiti evolved in ‘post-graffiti’, and should not be confused with ‘real’ graffiti.

Whereas Silva defines ‘real’ graffiti as locally specific denunciations, resistance, and

opposition, he claims that post-graffiti, such as street art, concerns images that are everywhere in the world the same and therefore lack any local specificity and societal concern. These classifications are obviously associated with moralistic values of profoundness and superficiality.

Likewise, the dominant trend in studies about graffiti in (post-) conflict contexts is to define political graffiti in terms of its profound symbolic political content (Peteet, 1996; Hanauer, 2011; Goalwin, 2013; De Ruiter, 2015; Zaimakies, 2015). In the methodological section graffiti scholars frequently announce that their study is based on a collection of photos depicting graffiti in a certain context. Subsequently, these photos are analysed in relation to the socio-historical context of which these graffiti are either a reflection or a representation. The analytical tools, if mentioned, are typically semiotic or linguistic. That is, to ‘read’ graffiti as a text or to deconstruct graffiti as a ‘narrative’. The seminal article of Julie Peteet (1996) on graffiti in Palestine during the heights of the Palestinian resistance is tellingly titled ‘Reading the walls [emphasize added]’.

For example, in the article written by Gregory Goalwin about political murals in Northern Ireland, graffiti is analysed as a political instrument to ‘mobilize cultural support for

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11 their political and military struggles’ (2013: 189). Like most studies on political graffiti, the murals are seen as a ‘narratives’ that support and reproduce an already existing political narrative. What makes these murals political is exactly their function in an overarching political struggle. For Goalwin, thus, it is the symbolic content of the murals that ‘reveals’ something about the political strategies of two competing political organizations.

Whereas I see the relevance of Goalwins analysis in terms of a study of nation-building (I will discuss a similar process in chapter two), questions remain if we like to understand the politics enacted in graffiti itself. Peteet (1996) acknowledges that graffiti is more than the representation of political action and argues that graffiti is in and of itself a political action. Nevertheless, the political aspect of the action is once again defined by the message; according to Peteet it is still the message of the graffiti that calls upon the passers-by to undertake political action.

Problematic to these studies is that they take the depicted, whether in word or in text, as a representation of political issues ‘out there’. Underlying this approach is the assumption that graffiti has to be ‘read’ in terms of representation. ‘Saying’ something about something else, or referring to something else ‘out there’. Implied in this approach is a distinction between graffiti that is political and graffiti that is not. Graffiti that does not contain references or representations of political issues is perceived as ‘merely’ aesthetic and not a worthy subject of serious academic study. These kinds of divisions, however, proved little helpful in my fieldwork.

Fieldwork experience: lack of political images

Calle Veintiséis is famous for its graffiti. It is a broad avenue that connects the city centre with the airport. As such, the large-size murals covering the walls of the buildings along avenue 26 offers the people that enter Colombia through its capital a first impression of the country. These graffiti are various in content but the most remarkable are those murals that explicitly depict episodes of political violence or the ones that commemorate the victims of political violence. These were the murals I, as a tourist, encountered during my first visit to Bogotá and which made me think about the relation between graffiti and a history marked by violent internal conflicts.

Yet, during my fieldwork, I found that these large-size murals, located at the ‘entrance’ road to Bogotá, were all sponsored or initiated by the government. The graffiti artists I befriended organized independent graffiti projects, or, at least that's how they wished

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12 to think of them. When I was documenting the process of these projects I noticed that few murals, or better, none, of the graffiti created in these projects made a direct reference to, or represented, political issues of the past or present. Concluding, on the basis of a lack of images representing political violence, that these projects are apolitical seemed to me too rush, too hurried. Instead, I decided to ‘slow down reasoning’ (Isabelle Stengers, 2005), and to ask: what about this overwhelming majority of graffiti that does not represent political issues in its imagery? What is the story behind this graffiti? And is there not a (different) politics to them?

Practice

Classical and current studies of graffiti raise questions about what is depicted and how these depictions represents ‘real’ social and political issues. Although an approach focused on matters of representations raises interesting issues about ‘political narratives’ (Hanauer, 2011), ‘the creation of myths’ (Goalwin, 2013) and the social-political context in which the graffiti evolves (De Ruiter, 2015; Peteet, 1996), it overlooks the actual practices and social relations that constitute the artwork in the first place. All traces of its making and becoming are hereby erased and black boxed.

I propose, therefore, to follow an approach focused on practice. The study of practice, studying what people do in practice, has been extensively articulated in material semiotics. A researcher following a material-semiotic approach assumes that nothing has a reality outside of what is made relevant in practice (Law, 2010). As such, Roger Sansi (2015), inspired by material semiotics, argues that artworks do not just stand for something else; artworks ‘do’ something. Therefore, Sansi proposes to move from an understanding of art in terms of representation towards an understanding of art in terms of action (2015: 43).

This study is thus concerned with the actual practices that constitute graffiti in Bogotá. In contrast to studies that focus on representation, I have intended to trace what politics are enacted in the practices that constitute social graffiti projects in Bogotá. This does not mean that I have disregarded the depicted and what is represented. On the contrary, the main question I purport to explore in the second chapter of this thesis has to do with the difference in imagery opted for in governmental graffiti projects and in informal graffiti projects

arranged by independent graffiti artists. Yet, instead of taking the different images as a final object of analysis, I take the different images as a starting point to ponder new questions. The

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13 question I thus will explore in this thesis is: if politics do not coincide with representation, then, what kinds of politics are enacted in these social graffiti projects?

Field/work: Creating the “field”

This thesis is the textual and visual objectification of a five months research process situated in Bogotá from the beginning of August till the end of December. In the months of

preparations, I had collected some ‘methodological tools’ that I deemed suitable for my, still abstract, research endeavour. Instead of describing what methods I used and how I gained information through these methods, I will reflect on how these ‘methods’ created my object of study.

Fieldwork, my supervisor told me, is initially designed to perform in small-scale locations, such as a village, a community, a tribe; places where the anthropologist is

confronted with the inevitability of (human) contact. Places where the anthropologist cannot avoid that everything what one observes, touches, hears, smells, and experiences, ‘speaks to you’. This inevitability provides the opportunity for what in anthropology is known as the method of ‘deep hanging out’. Nonetheless, I persistently resisted settling for another location since I thought that the Capital would be the place par excellence for graffiti practices to be researched (an idea that is probably not only based on my former visit to Bogotá but also on my assumption that the capital is a place of greater creativity).

The weeks before my flight I started to become anxious. How will I find informants in a city of over nine million inhabitants? Will I ever find my way in a city that comprises 1,587 square kilometres? Practicing fieldwork, as fieldwork is most significantly defined by active participant-observation in the lives of your informants, proved to be indeed not an easy task in the mega-city. My ‘field’ was scattered around numerous places across town. To observe and participate in the lives of those I wanted to know more about, I had to actively arrange for meetings in different places and travel considerable distances every day.

In addition, I found that the production processes of graffiti projects are not only place-specific but also short in duration. Therefore, my ‘field’ moved rapidly from place to place. As a result of the short-lived character of the graffiti projects I was constantly on the outlook for new projects during my five months of research. Although I initially had expected to follow one group of graffiti artists in their activities, I found that to remain active in ‘the field’ I needed to divide my attention between different groups of graffiti artists.

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14 doubtful about the quality of my ‘fieldwork’. Am I ‘hanging out’ deep enough? Do I spend enough time with each group? How to participate in everyday life not related to graffiti projects? I found shelter in George’s Marcus proposition of a multi-sited ethnography, in which he suggests a strategy of empirically tracing cultural formations throughout multiple sites by following connections and associations (Marcus, 1995). Yet, the greatest knowledge I gained from this forced ‘strategy’ is that the only reason that my ‘field’ existed, was because of my own active construction.

During my time in Bogotá, I created my own network of connections that I came to regard as ‘the field’. First I got in touch with a collective that called itself, SurVano [south goes], which was made up out of four grafiteros in their mid-twenties, who lived in a marginalized neighbourhood in the South of Bogotá. They organized a festival in their own neighbourhood and invited hundred other artists to participate. Here, I got to know other artists and I started to meet some of them as well. These people were already connected since they participated in the same project. At other occasions, people got in touch for the first time because of my involvement.

For example, I had met Leonardo, a young middle-upper class guy who tried to organize a graffiti tour in a marginal neighbourhood in the centre of the city. When I told him about SurVano, he asked their contact information to involve them in the organization of the tour. Another day Leonardo proposed me to come along to San Cristóbal to meet another collective doing similar things. Here I met Jesús, of ArtoArte and we discovered that we had a shared friend: Lucas, member of SurVano. Later that month I brought Jesús along when I was supposed to meet Lucas at Universidad Nacional. There, Jesús met a friend of Lucas and they exchanged cards to be in touch for future projects. What interests me here is that the network I supposed to study was rather the network I created around me. The field in this sense was not ‘out there’ waiting to be studied, but rather the product of my own active construction.

The constructiveness of ‘the field’ appeared not the least to me because I approached the projects with my camera. As Møhl has argued, carrying out anthropological research with a camera has implication for what comes to constitute your ‘field’. ‘In the end, it is the participation that determines and shapes the field, and not the other way around’ (Møhl 2011: 227). Participation, in turn, is shaped by the act of filming. As I will show in the following paragraph, my filming practices structured my positions in the field.

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15 Film in anthropology is typically used as a means for audio-visual representation or as a method of data collection. Yet, as Møhl noticed, filming is often seen as a separated, or an additional, practice to the anthropological practice of knowledge production. As such the assumption is that ‘the filmic representation reflects the knowledge of the anthropologist but does not alter it’ (Møhl 2011: 228). This assumption is strange, considering that the fieldwork process is often regarded as an iterative process; constantly moving back and forth the

production of knowledge and the representation of newly gained knowledge. Therefore, Møhl urges anthropologist who opt for a filmic approach, not to overlook how the camera becomes part of the actual knowledge production process in the present.

During my research, I used my camera as a means to collaborate with the people that invited me to be part of their projects. I used my camera the first time during the project Museo Libre [free museum]. Lucas, one of the members, stressed that it would be great if I wanted to research the project, because, he said, a lack of research on social art projects keeps the different local projects disconnected with the rest of the world. I understood that in this story I was positioned as a potential connection with ‘the rest of the world’. Consequently, when I proposed to document the project on camera and make a little video for them, they did not hesitate to take part.

Although I had my own pre-conceived ideas about what I wanted to film during the project (I wanted to follow the ‘becoming’ of a mural and all practices that involved its constitution), I quickly started to realize that my hosts heavily determined what I was able to film. Since the project was situated in a marginal district, they would not let me walk on my own with the camera. They suggested I would follow either Lucas or Wilson when making

rounds through the neighbourhood to make sure that the artists got all the help they needed. Quickly Lucas asked me whether I had done interviews with the artists about their

experiences in the neighbourhood. I found it interesting that he wanted to document these interviews and I was curious of what he wanted to find out. Therefore, I proposed that he could do the interviews and I would follow him with my camera. By letting Lucas decide on the questions I had a peek into his agenda. What Lucas wanted to know from the artists was whether they had changed their opinion about the neighbourhood, stigmatized as dangerous, now that they have actually been here and met the people.

Encouraged by the thought-provoking outcomes of our collaborations, I decided that for the construction of the video it would be an interesting experiment to continue our partnership. I proposed that we could edit the video together. For them it would be an opportunity to make a video about their project, the way they like to tell the ‘world’ about it

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16 and to use it for funding in the future, and for me it would be equally an opportunity to see how they like to represent themselves and to gain further understanding in how they reflect upon their graffiti practices.

We watched all the clips together to familiarize ourselves with the available material. Subsequently, I asked them to write down the clips they liked and to start to think about the story they wanted to tell. They ordered the clips and visualized the sequence in a storyboard. They also designed the graphical layout and picked the ‘soundtrack’. Tellingly, they decided on the song ‘Somos Viento’, we are the wind, a song about the courage to work for a better future, freedom and dignity. Later, in their Facebook updates, this title became their creed. It was through this partnership I found out about the things they valued in the project, how they liked to communicate the project to a wider audience and how they made sense of what they were doing. Therefore, I will use the process of collaboration as anthropological data on and off itself in my thesis.

Outline

The remainder of this thesis sets out to explore what kinds of politics are enacted in the graffiti projects I observed for my research. In each chapter I will trace out different dimensions of the graffiti projects that cumulate together in my conceptualization of the politics enacted. That means that, although each chapter can be read on its own, things will come together in the last chapter, which is the most theoretical off all. In the first chapter I set out to describe the practices of the graffiti artists involved in projects I define as social graffiti projects. Here I argue that besides the outcome of the graffiti practices, the graffiti, what matters to the artists is the social process that constitutes it. In the second chapter, I will return to the importance of the depicted and try to find an answer to the question: why does the state depict scenes of unambiguous political violence and conflict, whereas independent graffiti artists rather opt for an imagery unrelated to political violence and conflict? To understand this contradiction I will explore perceptions of national history and ponder about the influence of historically constructed knowledge on the perception of the Self and practice in the present. In the third and last chapter I will draw the different story lines together and conceptualize what kinds of politics are enacted in graffiti projects. I will highlight the importance of the concepts of care and pleasure to understand the politics enacted in these social graffiti projects. Finally, in the conclusion I will postulate how this research can attribute to

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17

Chapter one: Social Graffiti Projects

Before reading the text I would like to invite the reader to watch the following video. The video does not serve as an illustration, neither as a natural documentation of ‘real’ life (at relevant moments I will discuss the making-off), but as anthropological information about real people, their faces, bodies, and actions. Besides introducing a setting and people, the video will sensitize your thoughts while reading the text comprising this thesis, and I will refer to the video multiple times. Thank you for taking the time.

[Instructions: download the ‘QR Code Reader’ in the App store. Open the app and scan the QR Code. You will be directed immediately to the website on which the video can be seen. Here you can press ‘play’ and the video will start. Make sure to watch when WIFI is activated]

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18 Storyboard

Scene 1. Open the door: 1, Repair; 2, Walking; 3, Enter the house; 4, Title; 5, Intro; 6, Pre logistics.

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19 Scene 2. Receiving the artists: 1, Artists; 2 Supply the materials; 3, Firms.

Scene 3. Presenting the artists: 1, Presenting; 2, Post logistics; 3, Atmosphere. Scene 4. Process of Painting: 1, Process; 2, Interview artists; 3, Return home.

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20 Scene 5. Supplying gifts/Tour: 1, Tour; 2, Walk to the viewpoint; 3, Gifts.

Scene 6. Closure/ Viewpoint: 1, Toasting together; 2, Viewpoint; 3, Credits.

Process

Lucas grabbed his notebook and keenly started to jot down the names of different carpets. His long brown dreads, loosely worn in a tail, slowly move along while he closely follows the movements of his pencil with his head. I had asked him to order the film clips we recorded during the project Museo Libre, organized by Lucas and three friends. First, ‘pick up the artist’, second ‘prepare the materials’, third, ‘logistics’, fourth, ‘interactions with the people of

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21 the barrio12’, fifth ‘process of painting’, and lastly ‘experiences artists’. After the jotting we watched the different clips again and started to organize them according to these different carpets, selecting those we liked and getting rid of others. The result of this classifying, selecting, and ordering is the storyboard depicted above.

The storyboard, drawn by Lucas, scripted the video you have seen just now. What is remarkable about the classification, and the subsequent storyboard, is that besides the

technical dimension of the organization (logistics, arranging materials) it is the social process that matters to Lucas. Instead of an extensive exhibit of the artworks (which were over

hundred), Lucas wanted to demonstrate the whole process of production. Going back to the making-of reveals that prioritized over the material results of the artistic practices (the murals) is the actual process that constitutes it.

During his fieldwork in Barcelona among contemporary artists, Roger Sansi (2015) observed a similar concern for process, rather than for the artworks as such. He argues that contemporary artistic practices in Barcelona, inside and outside the museum, could be approached as social practices that produce social and political effects. To explore the social ‘work’ of artworks Sansi proposes three metaphors: the device, the trap, and the gift. The metaphors are in no way exclusive; they overlap and extend one another. As such, the metaphors articulate different ‘workings’ of the artwork.

I will borrow these metaphors, to think through the various social practices that constitute the graffiti projects I encountered during my fieldwork. In this chapter, then, I will begin with a description of graffiti projects as devices. Here, I will explore how the artists themselves describe graffiti in terms of a tool for transformation and change. Then, I will move on to consider the device in terms of a trap. Here, I will articulate patterns of social relations that constitute the graffiti project and those that are constituted by the projects. Lastly, I will consider the graffiti projects in terms of a gift to discuss the implied reciprocity of social exchange that underlies the graffiti projects.

12

Barrio is the Spanish term for neighbourhood or district. The term is accepted in the English language and I will continue using it as an English word referring to a district or neighbourhood.

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22

Device

Artworks, Sansi (2015) argues, can be seen as devices. A device is described by Cambridge dictionary as ‘an object or machine that has been invented for a particular purpose’.13

A device, thus, is defined as a purposeful object. But it can also be, according to Cambridge second definition, ‘a method that is used to produce a particular effect’. A device, thus, does not need to be something tangible; a device can be a way of doing, a method, an approach, or a technique.

John Law proposes that we could think of a device as a patterned teleological

arrangement (2013: 229). That is, a particular pattern of relations that produce a certain effect. Do not be deceived by the technical association of the term, all devices do social work (ibid.: 230). As such, approaching graffiti projects in terms of a device, offers me the opportunity to study the social work and patterns that constitute the graffiti projects. To trace these patterns, I will start with considering how the artists represent the graffiti projects as a device for transformation themselves.

Transformation

The ride from downtown to Portal del Tunal, the end station of the city’s bus system in the southern part of Bogotá, took me almost an hour. The bus was crowded, as always. Yet, that did not prevent street entrepreneurs from entering the bus and selling their products, tragic stories, or artistic skills. When I got off at Portal del Tunal the enormous contrast with the northern part of the city struck me immediately. An elongated dry and dusty plain, punctuated by steep

mountains crowded with miniature houses, replaced the high-rise blocks and bustling asphalt highways of the North. Immediately, I remembered the remark of my flatmate in the northern part of the city when she tried to explain the bicycle lanes in town. ‘There are two Bogotá’s Fenna; the North and the South. Never go to the South, it is really dangerous.’

To get to Ciudad Bolívar I had to take another bus in direction of

Candelaria, the lack of ‘La’ before ‘Candelaria’ subtly distinguishing the touristy historic centre, from a rather unknown barrio in the South. Whereas I thought that

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23 the busses in the Centre and the North are crowed, those in the South are

absolutely packed. Another thirty minutes later I got off at the stop next to the Casa de la Cultura of Ciudad Bolívar. The conference room of the cultural centre was set up to accommodate at least eighty people, but half an hour after the prefixed time of the forum not a quarter of the chairs were taken. Behind the conference table a beamer projected YouTube clips of hip-hop musicians. A flag with the colours of Colombia and one with the logo of Ciudad Bolívar, peaked behind the conference table, obstructing the visibility of a couple of graffiti style paintings on canvases.

In front of me, two young boys, wearing slightly too big baseball caps, quietly waited in anticipation of the forum. On my left, a group of teenage girls were cheerfully gossiping, occasionally erupting in suppressed giggles. Slowly more people trickled in; a thin lady with grey-white hair worn in a tight knot was followed by a group of adolescent boys dressed in baggy clothes and baseball caps. Suddenly, a girl with radiantly blue hair swaps the hip-hop clips for a video depicting a woman reading out loud the declaration of human rights.

A girl somewhere in her mid-twenties with black curly hair and a tiger print jumper, grabbed the microphone and welcomes us all. ‘Thank you all for being here,’ she enthusiastically addressed us. ‘Today we will be listening to the experiences of graffiti artists involved in arte comunitario [community art].’ ‘As we all know,’ the girl resumed, ‘graffiti has a transformative purpose.’ ‘Graffiti artists should, therefore, work collectively and transform those spaces where problems of inequality and violence are apparent, such as Ciudad Bolívar.’

The girl emphasized that they have organized the forum by themselves – the collective SurVano [south goes] and Cultura 19 [culture (of district) 19] – independent of any governmental interference.14 Last years they had collaborated to organize a project they call Museo Libre in Ciudad Bolívar. The idea is to turn Ciudad Bolívar into an open-air museum, so that ‘the residents have a reason to be proud of their barrio’. The forum, the girl pointed out, is an attempt to organize better and strengthen the collaboration between various artists and collectives by

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24 sharing experiences. The speech by Patricia Ariza about human rights, she added, served as their inspiration.15

This day different people gathered to discuss arte comunitario in a marginal neighbourhood in the South of Bogotá. Central to the gathering was a discussion of the social process that constitutes graffiti in communities, rather than the graffiti as such. This process appears to be, above all, a social transformative process. The object of transformation, in this case, is a community. And especially such a community like Ciudad Bolívar suffering the

consequences of social exclusion and marginalization. To realize this transformative purpose of graffiti, the girl proposes that graffiti artists should strengthen their collaboration, share experiences, organize better, and let themselves be inspired by the declaration of human rights.

As such, the forum makes explicit a conviction widespread among graffiti artists involved in collective graffiti projects in Bogotá: graffiti art should generate societal change. Most graffiti artists I have met during fieldwork, talk about their actions in terms of an alteration and narrate the effects they hope to produce in terms such as intervention,

recuperation, transformation or even resistance and struggle. How should we understand this call for graffiti to make a change?

Graffiti, a device for political action

When there is a place that doesn’t look well, after they paint it, it starts to transform and it will end up as a nice place, including a place that now will

internationalize. Tourism will come; it will be an attraction for people, like a point of interest in the world, a place people like to visit instead of pass over – Lucas

In Bogotá’s mainstream media and collective imagination Ciudad Bolívar is pictured as an utterly dark and dangerous place. The city council has officially classified geographical areas into hierarchically ordered categories of socio-economic class. The district of Ciudad Bolívar is classified as ‘bajo-bajo’, that is, lower than low. Situated at the periphery of the southern part of the city, Ciudad Bolívar came into existence as a settlement of (mostly rural and

15_{Patricia Ariza is a playwright, poet, and actor. Well known for her work that addresses violence and the peace}

buildings process. Founder of Cumbre Mundial y Cultura para la Paz Colombia; an annual artistic festival organized by the government in which culture and art are combined with peace building practices.

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25 indigenous) domestic migrants. The mixture of an economic low status, internal migrants, and a mala fama [bad reputation] as the epicentre of drugs and crime, shape invisible borders that stop (slightly better) well-off people to step foot in the South.

Museo Libre, Lucas emphasized in the quote above, should counter this stigma and turn Ciudad Bolívar into ‘a point of interest in the world’, a place that people visit, instead of ignore. As Wilson explained as well to the lady in the video, 'So that people would say: ‘Ciudad Bolívar, Let’s go there, cause there’s lots of art to see!’ In this story, thus, the object of transformation is the mala fama of a community.

During the project, over the hundred murals were created on the walls that comprise the houses of the residents. Of all these murals, only one represented explicitly a political issue in its images. This mural critiqued the always surveilling eye of the government and was made by a Swiss visiting artist. The greater majority of the murals depicted local and

domesticated animals, mermaids, monsters, portraits of kids, women, or other carefully crafted images.

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26

Mermaid. Photo by Fenna Smits

To conclude that the Swiss artist is the only one acting politically would be too rush, and to overlook the socio-political context in which these murals are produced. If we look at the project in terms of a device, a tool that intervenes and produces an effect, we can see that the graffiti itself ought to work as a device of political action: the transformation of a

stigmatized barrio through graffiti. Yet, how, exactly, is graffiti envisioned to transform a community?

Transforming relations, transforming a barrio

The idea for the project began as a graduation project of Lucas. Lucas grew up in Ciudad Bolívar and studied at a private university of arts in the northern part of the city. Lucas told me he always felt ashamed of being from Ciudad Bolívar. ‘I believed in the stigma myself, you know? I believed that we are violent and bad people!’ As a kid, Lucas was afraid to be out on the streets in his own barrio. He never went further than his house and the school, avoiding the streets as much as possible. Museo libre was for Lucas, therefore, also a personal process of transformation.

When I started to write my thesis I talked about appropriation, about identity, about territory, and all that stuff. But it scared me to go out on the streets by my

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27 own. It scared me as well to go to the supermarket. So I noticed that Museo Libre, well, in the end—yes it’s a project that has a lot to do with the people, a lot with the transformation of a territory, and everything that came out of it—but, in the end, Museo Libre was a project that transformed me, as a person. It made me accept that I am from this territory and that, despite all that’s going on here, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I mean to demonstrate myself that to be human is not only how one is born, but also what one does. Hm? So it’s not like, I was born in Ciudad Bolívar, which is the most dangerous district in Bogotá, so that’s why I will be the ‘Capo’ [drugs chief]. No! After Museo Libre I realized that I could be from Ciudad Bolívar, that I could say that I am from Ciudad Bolívar, live here and accomplish to be, well, a different person than what they expect. And off all of these questions, I can think now, but let’s say, at that time it was a very confusing process and when I started to paint on the streets, of course, I painted with fear!! I painted with fear…

When I asked Lucas what he was afraid of, he referred to the people on the streets. Afraid to be there on the streets with them, that they would attack him, or something bad will happen to him. But what happened was the opposite of what he had been afraid of:

I started to relate with the persons that scared me. So all the rascals, thieves, drug addicts and snitches of the barrio where behind me and said ‘Uyy good artists,’ this and that, ‘what’s up?’ They sympathized with me, and they all invited me to come smoke marijuana with them. So it was, like, establishing a relation with them, not because we went out together to steal or to get drugged out, or

something like that, but starting from art. Like sharing a place with them here in the streets, while painting. And so, nothing happened the next weeks when I was painting another mural. And they started to follow me, and they offered me their help while they were calling me ‘Jaimesitó’.16 So like ‘How cool Jaimesitó that you are painting.’ So the next time they saw me it was like, ‘When will you be painting next time, and where?’ So I started to establish a different relationship with the people, and it is here, that I say, all of these are seats of transformation.

16

Jaimesitó is the nickname of Jaime Garzón. Garzón was a much-loved public figure, critical journalist, comedian, and peace activist who was assassinated (presumably) by paramilitaries, yet the case until now remains open and unsolved. Garzón has therefore become emblematic for injustice and impunity in Colombia.

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28 Lucas often posts updates like ‘long live my barrio’ on Facebook, accompanied with a picture of Ciudad Bolívar. By starting to paint on the streets of his own neighbourhood, transgressing his borders of fear, Lucas transformed himself from being someone who was ashamed for his origin, to someone who felt proud to be from Ciudad Bolívar. Through the painting, and the being there on the streets, Lucas established positive relations with the people he used to fear: the thief’s, drug addicts and snitches. Instead of attacking him, they encouraged him. This conversion of a negative relation based on fear of the unknown into a positive relation based on actual positive interactions, is where Lucas points out ‘the seeds of transformation’.

Likewise, for Wilson the object of transformation is the form of interaction that he found prevailing in the barrio. Wilson has lived in Ciudad Bolívar all his live and became involved in Museo libre after Lucas had asked him to help with the organization. Whenever I followed Wilson on his rounds in the neighbourhood, it always struck me how careful and politely he approached his neighbours. Wilson’s many tattoos and undercut punk haircut seemed at odds to me with his gentle and benevolent manners of interaction (which says more about my preconceived assumptions than about Wilson as a person). Yet, when Wilson told me a story about a conflict during a former edition of the project, I realized that the

interactions between neighbours are exactly the object of transformation of the project. Last year, Wilson told me, there had been a conflict between artists and ‘lads’ of the barrio who sold drugs at a place where the artists had painted. According to Wilson people started to use the passage more frequently after being painted. They had ‘opened-up’ the place, which caused irritations with the ‘lads’ who rather kept the place closed-off for the sake of business. Yet, after a while, they ‘left us in peace,’ Wilson assured me. ‘They said, alright, don’t worry. From now we will make sure nothing happens to you.’ When I asked Wilson why he thought their attitude had changed radically he said:

I think that many persons are trapped in consuming drugs and everything, and when they see a way out, when they see something artistic, I think they will be reflecting on what they could do. Because there are many people here that have talent in different artistic realms. But the forms of interaction between persons here in the barrio, according to my criterion, are badly violent. So, if I want something of you, I will treat you badly, and there is where we have an interaction, you see? From there on we might become friends. That’s like the

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29 format, that I feel, how people interact over here. Starting from the fear, or

something like that, to say, ‘Hi, how are you?’

To be more specific Wilson recounted the event when a young guy in the

neighbourhood tried to steal my camera when we were filming during Museo Libre. ‘Do you remember when the guy tried to steal your camera?’ I nodded, having the event vivid in my memory. At a Sunday morning a skinny guy, somewhere in his twenties, grabbed me from behind and tried to rip off the camera that hovered around my neck. In his one hand a bottle of beer and in his other a small knife. I gave him the camera, but Wilson ran after him and got it back. ‘Well,’ Wilson went on. ‘Recently I encountered him again and I was very angry with him, I felt a lot of anger! But he ran into me and said that he felt sorry, that he wanted to apologize, that he did it only because he wanted to provoke, you know? And that was his way to interact with us. It was not like to say, “Hey come on, what are you guys doing, I like to know what’s going on!” you know? No, this was his way, to say like, “Yes, I live here as well, you better get to know me.”’

Through Museo Libre, Wilson thus hoped that people would establish different forms of interactions. Graffiti, as ‘something artistic’, might, according to Wilson, serve as a ‘way out’ and offer alternative formats of interactions. These interactions will be discussed later when I look at the graffiti projects in terms of a trap. Here, it suffices to note that Museo Libre is presented as a device to transform the forms of interactions in the neighbourhood. Yet, not all graffiti artists talked about their actions in terms of transformation. Some artists subscribed to a less radical version of change and rather talked about ‘interventions’. Intervention

The sun was bright that day. Especially there, up in the mountains of Bogotá, you can feel the sun slowly burn your skin away. I got off along a highway that runs from the last bus station in the southeast of the city, up into the mountain of San Cristóbal. In contrast to the dry mountains of Ciudad Bolívar, the mountain of San Cristóbal is richly vegetated by many different sorts of trees and plants. From the highway, I looked down on the city’s centre and the northern part of town, a two-hours bus ride away. Again, the immense distances that comprise the city of Bogotá astonished me. While waiting I felt more as if being transported to a different part of the country, than to the outskirts of the city. I was waiting for

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30 Jesús, one of the members of the collective ArtoArte. He had agreed to show me

around in his barrio and to introduce me to the work they do there.

Jesús dressed in his usual simple sweater and jeans and with his typical red woollen bonnet, partly hiding his half-long black locks, picked me up at the bus stop. We walked along the highway further uphill. While walking we passed a colourful mural, depicting animal and human faces in an infantile style. Jesús explained that this mural is the work of an artist from Bogotá, who was inspired by indigenous imagery but remade it in his own childish style.

‘How would you actually call what you are doing here?’ I asked Jesús. He hesitated for a moment, so I added, ‘would you call it graffiti or rather

muralismo?’ ‘Well,’ Jesus replied still dubiously. ‘I think maybe muralismo,’ but he added immediately, ‘actually we almost never talk about it in that way, we rather talk about intervenciones. It’s not so much about the mural. It’s more about the act of intervening, you know?’ I immediately regretted my hasty insistence to classify the practice. Too quick I wanted to impose my own definitions and assumptions.

Later that day, I begun to have an idea of what Jesús had meant with ‘the act of intervention’. While we passed the barrio Santa Rosa, Jesús told me a story about an intervention they had done there. He told me that the situation in Santa Rosa is tense because politicians have assigned houses to both ex-combatants, perceived as perpetuators of internal organized violence, and displaced Afro-Colombians, perceived as the victims of this violence.17 ‘It’s always like this,’ Jesús said agitated, ‘politicians make plans without thinking about the

consequences for the people to whom the plans are assigned.’ Therefore, Jesús and his collective had done an ‘intervention’.

They had created a mural in the barrio Santa Rosa. ‘But this time,’ Jesús added, ‘the mural served more as a way to find an opening to the barrio and the people living there.’ This opening provided Fabio, baptized as the ‘sociologist’ of the collective ArtoArte, the opportunity to write short chronicles about the

interactions in the barrio. ‘So that’s why I don’t like to say that we are muralistas, or that we only do murals. No, that’s why I told you we do intervenciones, it

17_{The term ex-combatants is often used to refer to demobilized guerrillas and paramilitary who try to}

re-integrate in society. ‘Desplazados’ [the displaced] is the term used to refer to internal displaced people who fled the violence caused by both guerrilla’s and paramilitary’s

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31 doesn’t matter whether these are murals, chronicles, mosaic, audio-visuals, or

whatever…no it’s to intervene in a place.’

The murals, thus, have to ‘do’ something. Provoke. Both artists and state officials used the term ‘intervention’ to denominate the act of creating a mural. The objective of an

intervention, in this sense, goes beyond the end product of the intervention (the mural). It is to become involved in a certain situation, to interfere. As the above example illustrate, an

intervention is thus a tool, a device, to interfere in a particular environment or situation. So how does this work? How do murals intervene, or interfere in a particular situation or environment?

Trap

Sansi proposes the notion of the trap, borrowed from Alfred Gell (1998), to conceptualize the agency of an artwork. He argues that the artwork can be imagined as an event that entraps different social relations. However, Gell’s understanding of the trap only indexes human agency, whereas Sansi extends this notion of the trap, following Bruno Latour (2005), as being constituted by a network of both humans and non-humans. In this understanding of the trap, objects and humans may become actors in the constitution of social relations generated by the trap. In this sense, it is the trap —hence, the artwork— that produces new encounters and social relations.

As I have tried to show in the discussion of the social graffiti projects in terms of a device, when artists spoke about a change, a transformation, or intervention, they often alluded to an alteration of, or intervention in, a relation (a relation with place, with a

community, with others). Therefore, in the following paragraphs, I will explore what kinds of relations constitute the graffiti projects, as well as what kinds of relations are generated through these graffiti projects. I will first discuss the mode of organization of the projects and subsequently discuss several moments of encounters.

Mode of organization: Colectivos

At 6 AM we gathered with all the artists participating in the project Fortaleza de la Montaña [fortitude of the mountain] at the intersection of calle 73 with carrera