GRAFFITI MUNDO HISTORY LESSONS

I'm a major fan of international graffiti, and I was especially impressed by the street art culture of Argentina. We signed up for two GraffitiMundo tours, hoping to photograph "pretty' and colorful" graffiti. What we saw was beautiful, memorable, and powerful.

Thanks to the Buenos Aires' Graffiti Mundo tours, we got the chance to tour two different neighborhoods with totally different Street Art styles. The neighborhood closer to La Boca had a lot more abandoned buildings, so the murals got the chance to be pretty massive in scale. This series was painted on the outside of a former jail, by a local artist who resourcefully used tar and gasoline liquids to paint the super sized caricatures. 

The massive political unrest has inspired a very prominent, and strong willed art style which speaks about the Argentine people's attitude to their government. Artists have found a place and a voice to comment about life in modern Buenos Aires through their supergraphics on the abandoned walls. Hearing our tour guide's stories was a rather sombering history and art lesson. What was most powerful was that this history has been the modern history of the nation, the political unrest happening in the last 10 years! We learned about the symbolism behind the art, understanding which pieces were created for what purpose. Here, Art is not decoration but a revolutionary voice to help its people speak freely when they can't use words.