Colours of Bogotá

Bogotá has a lot of charm. Being pickpocketed my credit card right after the graffiti tour doesn’t change this fact…

Jeff, the guide with an anthropology degree, gave a great two hours+ long tour, explaining graffitis and their cultural, historical or political significations. Let’s give you some of it.

There are basically 3 types of graffitis

• Tags
• Wildstyle
• Murals

made using one of 2 methods

• Painting
• Stencil (use of an intermediate object to obtain quickly the desired shapes)

under one of 2 conditions

• Legal (authorised or commissioned)
• Illegal

Tags are just names spread somewhere. Quick and dirty, they can be an expression of living: through taking the risk of getting caught, you show you exist and it’s worth leaving a trace.

Tags: people leaving their name

Wildstyle graffitis are more complex. Just like tags, they normally carry a name, but the style is more exuberant, and beauty is a goal. It’s often an expert playground, since the layman could not decipher the letters. Also, wildstyles can easily fuse with murals.

With wildstyle graffitis, the harder the letters are to read, the better. The more illegal the graffiti, the greater.

Murals are the artistic paintings representing something else than letters. Mystical creatures, farmers, women, abstract designs… Graffiti artists tend to have something personal that allows the layman to recognise him. Colours, patterns, additional eyes…

The artist who painted the left one likes to make many eyes. Check the park in the below.

There are over 8000 street artists making up Bogotá graffiti scene. So, let’s not try to name them. A graffiti lifetime is extremely variable. Most won’t last a year. The oldest notable one is 6 years old.

This graffiti was commissioned. The swastika on it, though, was not. Neither were the black markings left by hooligans. At least someone crossed the swastika.

Most graffitis are put there illegally, but the edge separating vandalism from art is blurry and moving with time. The city changed its approach after 2011, after a graffiti artist was killed in action and then framed by the policemen. This was one of the two events that got the street artists to push the government to change.

Rumour has it that the artist’s ex specialises in butterflies…

The second one was in 2013, when Justin Bieber, from his high imagination, was escorted by the Colombian police to tag a Canadian flag. With a marijuana replacing the maple leaf… Local artists swiftly painted over all of Justin’s marks shortly later.

The message ‘We are memory’, against the bulldozer and the helicopter, because once the locals’ lands were destroyed it only existed in memories. On the right, ‘Pez’, meaning ‘Fish’, left his mark.

Indeed, the following weekend, 70 graffiti artists gathered and sprayed for 24 hours straight.

Left: ‘Wasn’t there two days ago’. Right: Signs behind signs, everywhere.

The parrot and its aureole, to defend innocent animals. A face that is part of a bigger painting. And below the street name, doggy style, a small LikMe

Left: Venezuelan woman. Right: animals in a post-apocalyptic Bogotá

Art in the making and… soldiers? It normally never happens.

Just explaining the graffitis of this park would take a couple of hours

What the soldiers were, repeatedly, protecting

Criticism of the corruption in the country with a piggy cop.

Notice that its left eye is painted on the post

Humans and nature towards machines. Work of the APC consortium

Most graffiti artists have jobs on the side: professors, workers…

Plenty of critics of society here, money paying for weapons, corruption, consumerism…

And then, there are these cones.

The good news is that, since I have lost my credit card, I stay in Bogotá longer than planned!