Candeleria district, Bogota, Colombia, 19 February 2019
At the start of a 6 week trip to Colombia to work with Anthropologist Cody Ross, i stopped for a day in Bogota. Part of the day, I was able to take in the street art near the hostel i was staying at in the Candeleria district. Bogota has become famous for its graffiti art. Beyond the world of self-promoting tags is a world of public street art often fanciful, sometimes political. The graffiti scene in Bogota has a long tradition, with a confrontational relationship with the police of a very right-wing law-and-order government. Putting art in public spaces was scene as a poitical act, independent of its content. The police understood it as the challenge to their authority and met it with violence. This conflict came to a head in when, in 2011, the Bogota police shot and killed a 16 year old graffiti artist, Diego Felipe Becerra, attempting to frame the non-violent young adult after the fact. After wide-spread protests and the arrest and convictions of the police involved, graffitti was legalized and has become a kind of state-sanctioned art form. There are many places to find highly skilled and inspiring graffiti art in Bogota. Candeleria is just one of them.
Slide show below… make take a couple moments to load…
Visual documentation supported by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture. Short videos of the different crafts shown in these stills forthcoming.