Since the early 2000s, the two largest cities in Colombia have been lauded as success stories of urban transformation. However, there is a tension between urban transformation narratives disseminated in international media and political discourse, and the realities of ongoing violence and insecurity. Drawing on ethnographic research following creative arts projects, this article offers empirical detail on how people negotiate this tension in marginalised urban neighbourhoods, which are often the most affected by overlapping forms of violence while being key sites of transformation policies. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation in Bogotá and Medellín, we show the complexities of how grassroots creative projects both mobilise transformation politics and negotiate violence in everyday life. By focusing on the local scale, we consider both the important gains that have been made since urban transformation became a key tenet of local government policy, particularly around challenging stigma, and the challenges that local populations continue to face. Ultimately, we argue that the experiences of the creative organisations we speak to reflect the need to negotiate ongoing structural violence and fluctuating support from the state. In contrast to depoliticised transformation narratives, this has implications for understanding the state’s role in the reproduction of violence in everyday life and appreciating the limitations of aesthetic transformation in marginalised urban communities.
The Lefebvrean concept of the right to the city denounces the realities of exclusion and alienation in urban society and demands social justice through the participation in, and appropriation of, urban space. Applying this concept to the contemporary context of graffiti in Bogota, this article aims to show how an analysis in line with an everyday geopolitics offers an insight into the everyday political practices performed by urban inhabitants. The right to do graffiti in the city is not simply demanded by graffiti artists but negotiated with the local government in Bogota, and this negotiation has both stemmed from, and contributed to, a legitimisation of this creative practice. However, graffiti artists also face the reproduction of processes of exclusion in everyday life and the limits of the right to the city are revealed through an aesthetic hierarchy that reproduces a social hierarchy.
Este artículo analiza la relación entre los imaginarios espaciales y la idea de una «política de escala». Partiendo del hecho comúnmente aceptado de que la escala no es un hecho empírico, sino una construcción que tiene lugar en condiciones materiales específicas, recurrimos a ejemplos puntuales para delinear cómo se despliegan diversos imaginarios sobre la escala según los intereses de proyectos políticos específicos. Planteamos que la Constitución de 1991 representa una suerte de «ajuste escalar» que fomentó el replanteamiento de las relaciones escalares, y que este proceso estuvo marcado por la aparición de la importancia del territorio. Por medio de ejemplos tomados de nuestro trabajo etnográfico en zonas urbanas, analizamos algunos casos de una pragmática de la escala, el uso estratégico de imaginarios escalares para promover determinados objetivos políticos.
For those interested in street art, Latin American cities offer a rich history of diverse artistic expressions in public spaces. Although not monolithic by any means, regional dynamics of shared practices and experiences can be traced, including the Mexican muralism of the 1940s that inspired artists to engage directly with the public, the political slogans of the 1960s that continue to accompany protests, the hip-hop and football barra graffiti writers adapting global subcultures to reflect their local realities and the street artists offering playful socio-political critiques. In Democracy on the Wall, Guisela Latorre explores this variety in Chile's dynamic street-art scene. While the history of grassroots arts practice is important, particularly the political mural brigadas supporting Salvador Allende's presidency, street art really explodes at the end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. This is unsurprising, given the gradual loosening of control over artistic expressions in the transition to democracy. However, Latorre focuses on the post-dictatorship period not to mark a shift but to understand the 'continuing cultural and institutional legacy of the military regime' (p. 7). Each case study of graffiti and muralism reveals artists' critiques of ongoing social inequalities, the dominance of the neoliberal model and the corruption of government and corporate elites that mark everyday life and the urban landscape. Latorre argues that such critiques are revealed not simply in the content of street art but in its praxis, and that, in voicing such critiques, the artists are 'enacting […] a visual democracy' (p. 4). By this she means that they are participating in the project of 'democracy to come', taken from Jacques Derrida, by simultaneously highlighting the failures of the democratic transition while trying to formulate alternative social relations. This framework is particularly useful for explaining the nuanced politics of painting in the street and is strengthened by the author's thoughtful visual analysis of street art that complements her oral-history interviews with artists. The muralism of the Ramona Parra and Chacón brigades described in Chapter 1 provides the most explicit example of the relationship between political activism and public art. The Brigada Ramona Parra opts for a simplicity of style, with bold outlines, iconic left-wing symbols and a replicability that encourages reproduction, while the Brigada Chacón produces papelógrafos, text-based political commentaries printed on streams of paper and then pasted in public spaces. Both, however, are continuing the legacy of militant art-making, whereby their recognisable style and iconography are embedded in their political messages of denunciation, mobilising political engagement within the community and promoting
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