All posts tagged: Codazzi

Blue Steel from the Streets. Colombia Diary : Day 4 / Interview with ERRE

May 17, 2018 Artists, Interview

Colombian Street Artist Erre began her career on the street in her home city of Zipaquirá as a teen but moved an hour’s drive south to the capital city Bogotá a few years ago to attend university and dive into the explosively growing scene on the streets there.

ERRE. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

With nightly outings in the larger metropolis, she and some mates have used political themes of their punk-inspired graphic works to push social attitudes about corruption, hypocrisy, race and gender equality.

With strong female figures that shout confidence and rock and roll, you can see the ERRE is helping define the kind of heroines she admires who take and active role in making change.

ERRE. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

After assisting Toxicomano to complete his large mural for this project, Erre had some free time to hit up some prime spots of her own in this distillery. Sometimes she worked freehand, and other times she dug into the stencils that she typically leaves on the walls in Bogotá.

ERRE. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

We asked her a few questions about her work.

Brooklyn Street Art: “Unete Al Disorden”. What does that mean?
Erre: “Join the chaos” – or something similar. I am inviting people to join in.

ERRE. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: When did you begin making art for the street?
ERRE: My first stencil was about 10 years ago and I have done many stencils in my home city Zipaquirá.

About five years ago I decided I would begin painting for a living and I have dedicated myself to this work.

BSA: Do you always use stencils?
ERRE: I always paint with stencils but sometimes I make an exception and do a piece by hand

ERRE. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Can you talk about the stencil that you made here which appears to be a message of empowerment for women and girls?
ERRE: Yes for women in Colombia there is a big problem – really in all of Latin America – with the rights of women. They do not receive equal pay for equal work, they do not get enough respect. There is a strong culture of “machismo” that exists with the men all of the time. So a lot of my work is intended to empower women.

BSA: Where do you get inspiration for your style?
ERRE: I think I draw a lot of inspiration from cartoons and illustrations like that. I draw all of the designs in a smaller size with the computer I enlarge them for this work

ERRE. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: You often have skulls in your pieces. Can you talk about the symbolism of using skulls for you?
ERRE: Yes I use the skulls as an human symbol because everyone has a skull inside you know? It’s a way for me to represent humans and people generally without referring to their race whether they are black, brown, yellow or white. It is sort of a universal symbol.

ERRE. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

This event has been made possible by Dictador Art Masters Foundation. To learn more about the foundation click here.

This is How It’s Done : Colombia Diary. Day 2 – Process

May 15, 2018 Artists

This week BSA is in an unusual location in Colombia by invitation to see a new initiative with Street Artists in an abandoned distillery now being brought back to life with their imaginations and penchant for transformation. Come along with us for a few days to see what we discover.

In factories and in art-making, process is crucial to success.

Back at this Colombian factory site for a second day of work, the artists are climbing ladders, tracing out shapes, stepping back to check perspective, and lunging forward for the first genuine phase of painting. The brand new initiative on this industrial site sparks your mind with ideas – nothing seems impossible, actually. The future is unwritten.

Ben Eine and Connor. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

So it seems especially appropriately audacious when you see Ben Eine and his son Collin rolling by you on a massive lift that holds them aloft overhead with cans in hand. You deftly dart out of the way so you are not smushed underneath the massive rubber tires that roll toward you, carefully ducking the occasional leafy limb that is snapped off the tree they are grazing in their metal bucket as they paint, now wrapping to another side of the building.

Ben Eine. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

They are spraying out a series of Eine’s iconic lettering across the top floor of one of the compound’s brick facades, and suddenly you may have the feeling that this is the first page of a new book being written. We may not yet know what it will say, but you can appreciate the process, two guys from different generations extending their arms toward the wall, can in hand, propelling clouds of aerosol forward, writing a common missive.

Ben Eine. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Scattered through these rusty dusty caverns and crooks there are Street Artists at work; with birds and bats and beats filling the air. A new of industry at work, one can appreciate now how the image is built. It’s a mysterious and sometimes spell-binding unveiling, carefully considered.

With no specific aesthetic guidelines from their hosts and no review of sketches, we are privileged to see these self-driven murals disclosed in real time without prejudice on walls of the artists choosing.

Stinkfish. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

There are myriad processes at play. Placed in the hands of artists who can appreciate the opportunity to create quality works , there is attention to detail and context. Whether it is D*Face’s ironic reappropriation of symbols/text and dramatically tragic heroes – or the pop culture humor of Toxicomano’s leopard queen, or the golden disk framing Stinkfish’s neo Colombian intergalactican icon, its a studied process that makes it happen.

Stinkfish. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

M-City drips with rivers of sweat in the merciless humidity while peeling away one more panel of his four pillar stencil opus called “Goldmine”, his paint encrusted hand dropping another wet cutout with a deft gesture – leaving it to drift in the heavy breeze 3 stories beneath him to the ground.

The Monstfur duo carefully balance on ladders to reach and hold stencils, spraying out each textured layer of industrially inspired grayness, careful to align the successive hand-cuts that they are gridding across a tank that previously carried toxic fluids.

Stinkfish. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

As this projects’ character is taking shape while we are watching, you see that these artists are pouring themselves into the act properly, giving top flight performances.

It’s part of the process.

D*Face. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Stephen Thompson of D*Face tam. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

D*Face, Louis and Stephen. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

M-City with Martha. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

M-City. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Monstfur. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Toxicomano. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Stinkfish . Ben Eine. Colombia. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

This event has been made possible by Dictador Art Masters Foundation. To learn more about the foundation click here.

New Spirits in an Old Distillery : Colombia Diary. Day 1

May 14, 2018 Artists

The fantasies of graffiti writers and Street Artists are myriad but a few rise to the top; the abandoned factory is like a fever dream for a certain passionate class of urban explorers who crawl through holes in fences and slide through broken windows just to discover what lies inside these neglected hulks of industry – and to leave their mark.

“So when I began painting in Colombia and mainly in Bogotá I would take a photograph of someone in Bogotá and paint it. When I started to travel and I began to take people from one place to another so for example I took people from Colombia to Mexico. I took a lot of photographs in Mexico and took those images with me to Europe. I enjoyed bringing Mexican and Colombian people to Europe. So of course when I was in Europe I took pictures of this girl who was in the subway in Paris – and I brought her back to Colombia,” says Stinkfish.

In the imagination of many aerosol-armed archaeologists is a vision full of heavy pipes, deep coal ovens, chicken-wired windows, soaring steel silos and rusted rotund tanks, puffy clouds of steam wafting about, electrical boxes with color-coded diagrams, and an endless array of iron walkways and ladders that criss-cross at tight angles and climb higher toward the promising future of the Industrial Revolution.

Imagine what it would be like to have one of these places all to yourself and your friends and instead of fearing the security guard, he is there to protect you.

This is precisely the project we have walked into – thanks to an invitation from Polish Street Artist and professor M-City, who has convened with Dictador Art Masters Foundation to invite an intimately eclectic mix of European and South American Street Artists to create new pieces inside the hidden compound nestled in leafy palm oil plantations and more than an hour from the nearest city.

Closed for decades, the former distillery still contains all its necessary armature of equipment and its ovens and tanks and charcoal barrels – along with tall grasses, a murky stream, many centipedes, some blue spotted wood lizards, black iguanas, and the occasional leopard Gecko.

BSA is here in Colombia for the next few days with M-City, D*Face, Stinkfish, Toxicomano, Ben Eine, and Monstfur along with some other special guests. Today we’ll just show you the work of the “advance crew” of M-City and the Colombian Street Artists Stinkfish and Toxicomano who checked out the place a few months ago and tested walls with some work examples just to see if it would be as divertido as they thought it would be to explore the old factory.

It is.

“This was just for fun it’s sort of an abandoned submarine which I also did it on a canvas,” says M-City. It is also on the wall at Urban Spree in Berlin.”

What appeals most to him about this project? “It’s exciting because it’s very far from my home in Poland and if you look around you see that there’s nothing around here. It is in the middle of nowhere. We just have the palm trees around and the distillery is in the middle. So we do not have a “public” here. The artists are completely free to do what they want and there are not many people around taking pictures – it’s even kind of secret. So it’s private and it is protected. Nobody can just drop in you know?”

Colombian Street Artist Toxicomano took us on a tour of a number of stencil based pieces he put up in advance of this weeks events, explaining that he likes to reclaim symbols and use them for his own meanings. One Smurf we found on a concrete-splattered tiled basewall says “Fuck Racism”.

“I like to use these images because people have in their minds some common association with it and they remember something about it from when they were a child. Now they can start to think about it differently.”

“In Colombia we have a mixture of races we have black people we have indigenous people we have roots from Spanish people and now we have American and European influences it’s a lot. We mix a lot of things like a soup like a Latin Americans Full of ingredients and we have a special flavor. Also I think a lot of people think of Smurfs as blue but they don’t know that the first Smurf comic was actually a black Smurf and in that particular story the blue Smurfs have a problem with the black Smurf.”

“This stencil got me in a lot of trouble on Instagram,” he says the stencil that says “Las mujeres son la verga” (roughly “Women are the dick”) – mostly because it is a slang that is interpreted differently across Latin America and Spain – including within his own native Colombia. Some thought it insulted women, others thought it empowers them. He says he really enjoyed seeing the differences of opinion but regretted that some of the comments got into personal attacks. “I preferred to not comment and to observe,” he says.

This event has been made possible by Dictador Art Masters Foundation. To learn more about the foundation click here.

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