All posts tagged: Aleix Gordo

BSA Film Friday: 06.05.20 / Dispatch From Isolation # 75

BSA Film Friday: 06.05.20 / Dispatch From Isolation # 75

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1. BCN Rise & Fall. Documentary History of Street Art in Barcelona

BSA Special Feature: BCN Rise & Fall, Documentary History of Street Art in Barcelona

The permissive nature of the city created a golden age of art in the streets, unencumbered by  the police or the city itself, an exciting destination for artists like Banksy, Space Invader, Os Gemeos, Aryz, BTOY, Kenor, Mark Bode, and Obey – but really it was an aerosol family reunion with relatives arriving from around the world.

Today we feature a well-researched and presented re-telling of the golden age of muralism born here in the first few years of the 2000s, spawning careers of many and attracting culture watchers of all kinds. As is the case with gentrifying spaces, the next phase after artists make everything pop with energy and new ideas, the vultures moved in to capitalize on it, and kill it.

Strict laws, strict penalties, and putting on a nice commercial face for the corporations and shoppers. Later, the creative spirit seems quashed – and the city that gave birth to a stunning spectacle seems completely unaware of how they shot themselves in the foot – until they have to pay to see the stuff in a museum exhibition later.

Now years later we have a clearer view of what transpired and why thanks directors Aleix Gordo Hostau and Gustavo López Lacalle, who painstakingly construct and deconstruct the story through colorful stories and an ocean of imagery. Political and sometimes divisive? Sure. A form of speech, undoubtedly. Pity it is manipulated sometimes to fit an agenda, even when the artist hadn’t intended it to be.

BCN Rise & Fall. Documentary History of Street Art in Barcelona

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BCN Transit Walls Festival during La Mercè in Barcelona

BCN Transit Walls Festival during La Mercè in Barcelona

Cultural organizations and lifestyle brands often pool together their resources and coordinate events to capitalize on foot traffic. It’s like punk kids organizing a skate event – with bands, djs, graffiti jams, tattooing… You can catch some air, catch a great show, catch a tag, and hopefully catch secret kisses behind some old rusty freight train all on one perfect Saturday.

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Cayn Sanchez. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

During the La Mercè Festival in Barcelona in September the organizers for “BCN Transit Walls” brought to life a former ‘hall of fame’ stretch of wall and captured the attention of a lot of folks who were in town for the concerts, fireworks, drummer parades, wine festivals, projections, human acrobat towers – and many other events marking the end of the summer. Organizers brought many artists together to paint live on the wall at Passeig de Circumval·lació; the incredibly long wall that surrounds the Barcelona Zoo at the edge of the Estació de França train tracks.

Lluis Olive Bulbena was there with his camera and he shares some of the walls here with BSA readers.

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Cayn Sanchez. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Kenor1 . Uriginal . Cintal Vidal . Lucas Milart. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Kenor1 . Uriginal . Cintal Vidal. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Kenor1 . Cintal Vidal. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Kenor1 . Uriginal . Cintal Vidal. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Lucas Milart . Cintal Vidal . Kenor1. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Uriginal . Cintal Vidal . Kenor1. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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SPOGO. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Aleix Gordo. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Roc Black Block . Cintal Vidal. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Roc Black Block . Cintal Vidal. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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BToy. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Hyuro’s BreastFeeding Mural is Not Provocative in Barcelona

Hyuro’s BreastFeeding Mural is Not Provocative in Barcelona

The Spanish Street Artist Hyuro again features the uncovered breast of a female form in her public mural.

The news here in Barcelona is that it is not news.

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Hyuro. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

Four years ago at a mural festival in Atlanta, Georgia the Argentinian artist was embroiled in a local “controversy” for painting a mural that depicted the nude female form. The monochromatic film-frame presentation across a long wall showed the incremental metaphorical shedding of wolves clothing to that of a human, then back to a wolf – or something like that. It’s open to your interpretation and not painstakingly explained by the artist, as is often the case.

Most viewers didn’t find it to be an eroticized presentation and some thought it had religious undertones actually. Alexandra Parrish, a principal organizer of the mural explained to the Huffington Post at that time that it was “a portrait of transformation, the mural reflects the teachings of the church.

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Hyuro. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

Regardless, the high-minded Atlantans who rallied to have that painting destroyed could only see that the mural presented naked lady parts parading in public, which could potentially light loins afire. Presumably none of those people were in attendance with more than 50,000 Beyonce fans this September at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, since it was essentially two hours of women strutting in high heels and highly revealing, even erotically inspired, costumes across enormous screens for everyone in attendance, including children, to ogle.

Here in Barcelona Hyuro doesn’t report any negative commentary coming her way for this mural painted with BCN Transit Walls in conjunction with La Mercè, Barcelona’s largest cultural, musical arts and communities festival. Named after the Virgin of Grace (Mare de Déu de la Mercè), the patron saint of the Archdiocese of Barcelona, you may think that the vision of a bared breast may cause a firestorm here.

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Hyuro. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

Like many of her public pieces the Hyuro’s mural is a series of frames that collectively can create a sense of motion when viewed in quick succession. This series depicts a woman opening her garments to expose her breast and give it to her nursing infant.

These are not erotic images but in a society that again is increasingly equating women’s worth with their their physical appearance and sexual availability, devaluing their intellects, and otherwise objectifying and sexualizing them in media and advertising imagery, a simple loving and nurturing act like this can be perversely, stunningly, misinterpreted.

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Hyuro. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

We often say that Street Art and Public Art are a mirror; a reflection of a society back to itself. Our extensive experience observing art in the streets has taught us that certain images are allowed by the greater culture to stay up while others are destroyed quickly. It is a fair measuring device for the opinions, mores, political leanings, and popular tastes of a locality.

Spanish passersby at this transit hub do not appear to find objection with this mural, but Hyuro might have to think twice about a mural like this in many American cities, where reports of shaming and bullying of breastfeeding mothers are still common.

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Hyuro. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

Not surprisingly perhaps, the candidate for the highest office in the US this year whom has not been a mother reportedly told an attorney that she was “disgusting” for requesting a break to breast-pump milk for her baby. She also may have been “nasty“.

Whether the female form is entirely sexualized in your mind or not, for the record, US federal law permits breastfeeding in any public area where you happen to be when your baby gets hungry and laws in cities like New York actually permit women to be topless in public at any time. It may take a while for popular tastes in art to reflect this in certain areas, and when it comes to legal mural festivals visiting artists are always wise to consider the audience.

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Hyuro. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

 


 

Our sincere thanks to photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena for sharing his images with BSA readers.

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BSA Film Friday: 05.31.13

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening: Las Calles Hablan : Street Art in Barcelona, RONZO Goes pre-historic with Skatersaurus, SAMO© by Aaron Rose and Thomas McMahan.

BSA Special Feature:
Las Calles Hablan : Street Art in Barcelona

“Las Calles Hablan is a story about discovering a hidden world, an extraordinary subculture and the struggle between an artistic community painting for freedom of expression and an increasingly restrictive dogmatic government,” says Justin Donlon as he speaks about this hour long documentary he made with Silvia Vidal Muratori and Katrine Knauer.

An educational and unpretentious study of the spectrum of Street Artists and techniques currently at play in Barcelona, the team traces  the scene through personal observations and their network of local and international artists, local gallerists, and their connections globally via the Internet.


The film traces the trajectory from the Street Art/graffiti’s emergence at the end of the 70s following the Franco dictatorship and the rise of international hip-hop culture through the 90s into a sort of freewheeling golden era in the early 2000s. It also explains the current unease with the city, the professionalizing of the artists through a growing gallery practice, and the collaborative initiatives of some community leaders with artists.

Taking a straightforward documentary approach, the motivations and inspirations of current artists on the scene are presented without much of the exaggerated myth-making that more commercial hype vehicles often contain. Included in the examination are how community and local citizens and authorities have taken a constructive role in facilitating space and opportunities for some artists here and elsewhere, while the definition and appetite for illegal work ebbs and flows.

Featured artists:Zosen, Mina Hamada, Kenor, Kram, El Xupet Negre, Debens, Fert, Dase, SM172, Ogoch, Kafre, Aleix Gordo, Meibol, Eledu, C215, H101, Miss Van, Btoy, El Arte Es Basura, Konair, Gola, Vinz.

(Image above a screenshot of Vinz © Las Calles Hablan)

RONZO Goes pre-historic with Skatersaurus

A quickie with RONZO, who quickly demos how his latest charactor, the Skatersaurus, is created and installed.

SAMO© – Jean-Michel Basquiat
By Aaron Rose and Thomas McMahan

An electric train switch clicking and collaged short of distressed city clips paying homage to the free floating and cryptic phraseology of Basquiat as his street writing alter ego SAMO© . This new video directed by Aaron Rose and Thomas McMahan is a thrill cut to a New York graffiti era ever more cast in amber, a choppy popping scratching archival image soaked indictment/celebration of conformist chaotic consumerist culture and the struggle to pay the bills, backed by a mechanical nihlist beat you can pop and lock to while name-dropping like Fab Five Freddy.  Don’t push me cause I’m close to the Vogue.

Music by N.A.S.A. featuring Kool Kojak, Money Mark and Fab Five Freddy
Animations by Maya Erdelyi and Alexis Ross

 

 

 

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