When in the early '50s Italian architect Carlo Scarpa designed the Venezuela Pavilion in the Giardini space of the Venice Biennale, he probably never thought that a few decades later the walls of his structure incorporating three volumes sliding against each other, would have been defaced by graffiti. Venezuela chose indeed to bring to this year's Biennale the urban art that decorates the streets of many of its cities, giving a new look to the rough concrete walls of the pavilion designed by Scarpa.
Curated by researcher, poet and artist Juan Calzadilla, the pavilion is entitled "El arte urbano. Una estética de la subversión" (Urban Art. Aesthetics of Subversion). The graffiti, the videos and video mapping installations that decorate its walls have brought to Venice the energy of youth and creativity and a form of art with no boundaries freed from the confinement of traditional museums and made by those anonymous artists reunited in collectives who are usually denied access to art galleries.
There is also another aspect involved: the works featured in the pavilion are deeply rooted in Venezuelan culture, they indeed hark back to the "pintas", that is phrases, expressions, and political slogans used during the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gomez by resistance movements and leftist parties to spread messages against the regime and the system and exercise their right to protest and their freedom of expression.
The graffiti crews (3BC, 346, 58C, AAA, CMS, CX3, GSC, IMP, PC, PG, PSC, ROS, SDN, SP, VO), the writers (Ker, Okso, Repe, Shelphyr, Slim), muralist collectives (360º, Colectivo Cultural Toromayma, Comando Creativo, La Kasa para la Raza, Silenciadores) involved in the pavilion prove that the discourse has evolved to more complex forms. The "pintas" have become more sophisticated and new generations of writers have endowed the original Creole graffiti with an aesthetic based on local elements, injecting in them their own codes and language frameworks, and incorporating in them historical landmarks and figures from the Bolivarian Revolution.
As Jorge Vivas, better known as "Shock" - one of the authors of the graffiti in the Giardini and the artist and writer behind the video mapping - explains, contemporary graffiti art is elevated to a socio-cultural phenomenon, and also represents an example of architectural environment.
Surely Scarpa coudn't have imagined to see the colourful graffiti on the simple and urban forms of his pavilion, but, if he had known the background of this form of art, deep down he would have probably approved.
How does the Venezuelan Government feel about graffiti artists?
Shock: Graffiti art is completely free and supported by the government. In the last five years the government showed it approves this art and as graffiti artists we have been living quite positive times in Caracas. A while back an organisation working with art groups in Venezuela organised a graffiti artist meeting in Caracas. Quite a few of the communicational brigades in which graffiti artists are organised in Venezuela took part in it and it was then that we found out that the majority of the artists working in Caracas are not criminals or juvenile delinquents, but most of them are actually intellectuals. This is an aspect that quite often remains unknown to a lot of people out there.
Why do you think that in many countries graffiti artists are perceived as vandals?
Shock: It's obvious that there are different trends and styles graffiti-wise. Quite often graffiti is perceived in a negative way because it invade sa prominent space such as the façade of a building, or trains, as it happens in Italy. But in Venezuela we strictly keep to walls and an important aspect in mural graffiti that appears in the streets of our cities is the right choice of space where the work will be realised. In order to do this the group takes into account factors that also include the visual-spatial perspective relative to the observer’s point of view, or the environment of the architectural elements with which the mural will interact with. Graffiti may mark an area that belongs to a group of artists rather than to another, but there is no confrontation between different groups, this is just the decided established division.
Does the division of the pavilion reflect the division in groups of graffiti artists?
Shock: No, this pavilion does not reflect any specific group or urban division, we decided instead to mainly focus on our roots. This is why one mural says "patamuna" meaning in the Pemón language, that is the original language of Venezuela, "soberanía", sovereignty; another mural spells in arty 3D letters "Abyayala", a word that comes from the culture of the Kuna people and indicates the name they used for the American continent. Then there is a mural with one of the most representative characters of our history wearing dark glasses, Simón Bolívar. For us this figure is not dead, but he keeps on being alive; he is not a character that you can put on a pedestal and treat like an old statue, but he is a person, his spirit lives in all of us and we are very proud of having him and of being able to represent him like that. Inside the pavilion there are videos of the main graffiti collectives and a video mapping that presents a new trend combining animation with graffiti.
In your opinion, what will the future of this form of art be like?
Shock: Attitudes towards graffiti have a wide variance. There are a lot of artists all over the world and quite a few of them have showed innovative and exciting paths for this form of art. In France there are artists who have been experimenting with graffiti made with lights projected on the façades of buildings. Since there are different trends when it comes to this art form, I think it will have an exciting future.
Images 1, 2 and 3 in this post by Italo Rondinella, Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia
Videos courtesy of Jorge "Shock" Vivas/Via Oeste Crew; Copyright © 2013 Via Oeste Crew.
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