January 2010: Left Hand Rotation in Madrid

I'm not a fan of personal practical jokes, but I love it when someone modifies cityscapes in a clever way. Madrid-based group Left Hand Rotation shares my admiration for witty urban interventions. Armed with a plethora of mediums and materials, they shake up Spanish city life on a regular basis. They write:

“We’ve been doing street art for about 12 years but we’ve worked under the name Left Hand Rotation for four. We started in the world of stencils, but over time we have evolved into something less aesthetic and more subtle: facilities and street actions, elements of everyday life taken out of context, changing the meaning and making it something provocative or critical.”
"We have a core of two to three people, but the group grows according to the project's needs."
"Urban actions, which we call ‘art misdemeanors, are only one of many things we do. We also work in video, sound, performance and installations. While we don’t always use the street as support, we love using the streets because you can interact with many elements and other people. Plus the visibility it brings is great. We do not consider our style to be well-defined as we like to question everything that we have previously developed.”
“In any case, our actions often have a large dose of wry, black humor, so we always have fun doing it. One of our latest projects involved some 36 people in the mountains. We tried to simulate the arrival of globalization in a rural setting with McDonald's or cow pastures stores and fashion in poultry houses and stables. We have also tested
theories about drift and ambulation which, fleeing the urban flows, lead us to the peripheries cities. In those places, seemingly nothing happens but it can lead to actions, as we learned in ‘Madrid, Closed For Vacation.’”

"Right now we are working on a project called ‘Moss Media. It’s based on the legend of a people: Bejar and his legend of the Moss Men. We try to elevate the status of this element of folklore by brining these characters into the city. We are also developing a new urban action based on the copyright symbol.”

Gracias, guys! For more clever culture-jamming, visit their Flickr.