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.

October 2009: Kid Chalao in Madrid

One of the reasons I love street art hunting is because it's an exercise of patience. So often, I find myself running from one activity to another with little down time in between. When I'm looking for street art, I'm forced to slow my pace and look for tiny details within the big picture. Looking for a sticker or wheatpaste is almost like meditating. Kid Chalao and I share the same philosophy about street art; maybe that's why I like him so much. (It could also be that his paintings are fantastic.) He writes:

“My name means 'nuts, crazy boy'. I think it is good being just a boy; everything remains to be learned and there are no certainties. Don´t really believe in those.”
"Even though I’m living, working and studying in Madrid, I come from a region in north-midwest Spain where there´s a really strong wine culture and an amazing folklore filled with stories and really old pagan tales. I´m mostly interested in tales and creatures, as well as in language itself. And I mean common people´s language, not the one they use from Institutions or from the power itself (which has nothing to do with people, but with the individual).”
"I do not really come from a graffiti background, but from a punk one, so those early paintings were just messages on walls. Before that , my brother and I used to write our nicknames in wet concrete. There´s still a few remnants of that in my hometown. Years after that, I moved to Finland for a year, where I started to become much more active with my friend Virta. Now I´m painting quite a lot in Madrid with my hobo-crew called VHS. Good vibes, fun and colorful stuff! We´re part of an urban-art open workshop at Patio Maravillas, a self-sustained social center in Madrid.”
"Urban art seems to be nothing but a present or a joke in the way that you´re wasting your energy, time and money just to suggest things, make people smile or share some ideas. Of course, you get nothing in exchange but these things got to be done if for nothing else, for conviction. Somehow in a world in which we´re forced to walk and listen to the media 24/7, I think it is beautiful to struggle for spreading art in our neighborhoods and cities, so we can gain some sanity.”
“I´m not sure about anything but as life is becoming faster and faster in cities, maybe we can try to endorse the value of “slow” and create art pieces that tell people to slow down and imagine for a change. But who knows…”

Gracias, Kid Chalao! For more fabulous photos, check out his Flickr.

September 2009: SpY in Madrid

For SpY, street art is all about how you look at things. Why stop at tags when you can warp the ordinary into something extraordinary? A football pitch with curved edges becomes a novel half-pipe for skateboarders. Who says graffiti should only be enjoyed by the sighted? Clever braille messages stuck all over the city leave unexpected messages for the blind. Even the little man on the traffic lights deserves a break sometimes; in SpY's world, it looks like the guy is hailing a cab. No matter the medium, SpY can find a way to transform everyday spaces into something unique. Urbanist and art professor Javier Abarca writes:

“Subtlety is not something that we're used to finding in the current street art scene. On some occasions, it comes off as intrusive as outdoor publicity, that inescapable machine whose existence is usually wielded as an argument to justify the presence of independent art in the street. But this isn’t the case with SpY. The participation of this man from Madrid doesn’t jump out at you. Rather, it waits until you run into it. It isn’t a monologue but a dialogue, between the artist and the environment, between the passer-by and the piece.”

"SpY began to act in the street while he was still an adolescent in Madrid during the mid-eighties. By the beginning of the early nineties, he had established himself as the leading figure of the still young state graffiti scene, offering works with an impeccable style and a solidity that even today are still not very common. Although this chapter closed a while back, SpY has not forgotten his roots. He is conscious that graffiti is a priceless, vital and artistic school and above all, an intensive and prolonged training in the exercise of observation and creative development of the urban environment."

"Around the mid-nineties SpY felt that he was outgrowing traditional graffiti as a means of expression. He soon began to play with the infinite possibilities that the surroundings offered his senses, recently freed from this narrow methodology. A maturation process began that has born his best fruit throughout the current decade."

"His work involves taking over urban elements through transformation or replica, commentary on urban reality and the interference in their communicative codes. The bulk of his production comes from observing the city and an appreciation of its components, not as inert elements but as a palette of materials overflowing with possibilities. The will of the game, the careful attention to the context of each piece and a constructive, not invasive, attitude characterize, without a doubt, his performance."

"Like the best examples of public art, the participation of SpY forms a whole with its context. It is in the fusion of these two elements, as well as in the chance encounter between the spectator and work, where the core of his proposal is found. For this reason, this man from Madrid does not produce work for exhibition in galleries and limits himself to exposing graphic documentation, which takes the form of very cared-for, large-sized photographs."

"SpY’s pieces want to be a parenthesis in the automated inertia of the urbanite. They are pinches of intention that are hidden in a corner for those who want to let themselves be surprised. Filled with equal parts of irony and positive humor, they appear to make the passer-by smile, incite reflexion, and to favor an enlightened conscience."

Gracias, SpY y Javier! For more photos and info, check out SpY's website.

August 2009: Ana Botella Crew in Madrid

When I was in Europe, I never made it to Madrid. Barcelona blew my mind with its beaches, paella, and street art. However, I'd love to take a trip to the Spanish capital. Daniel sent me a note about what Ana Botella Crew are working on; I'm quite intrigued. He writes:

“Ana Botella is the wife of the former Spanish President José María Aznar, the one who started the Iraq War alongside Bush and Blair. Currently, she is also in charge of the department of the environment in the City of Madrid. It´s quite ridiculous because her husband is one of the most prominent Spanish neocons arguing publicly that the weather change and the environmental crisis are not real. He has been organizing master lectures at universities talking about the weather change conspiracy and adding that it’s all a fake created by new communism! Ana Botella follows this trend, and at the local level has carried the disdain for environmental practices to her own department at City Hall. She’s expanded this repressive policies to include social and cultural practices.”
"She is also a member of the right religious organization called OPUS DEI (The right of the right in the Holy Fucking Catholic Church) And lastly, she said that GRAFFITI is not an ART, and that Madrid spends 6 millions per year erasing graffiti, demagogically concluding, ‘With this money, we could have built 6 hospitals.’” “’I´ll destroy GRAFFITI’", she added.'”
“For all these reasons, and as a reaction to the stupid letter that she sent to every Madrilian with her signature arguing, among her measures for ‘integral cleaning of the city,’ that all graffiti was going to be removed, we had the idea of doing this open action using her own medicine! In fact, with so many politicians proposing recently to use municipal money to hire forensic graphologist to identify taggers and other street artists, we thought it would be a nice touch to use her own signature in this project. That action became really popular in Spain and also in other countries. For instance The Independent of London talks about us.”
“Welcome to this International Stencil Conspiracy! In essence, we are an open, global, and street-art action that criticizes and mocks a prominent politician who prosecutes graffiti. She also holds other backward opinions and policy proposals (from anti-gay rights, to reverse sustainability and social exclusion, you name it...) In response, the open group encourages artists and sympathizers to stencil the globe with her own signature.”
“While it has a strong tongue in cheek component, I believe it also encourages the discussion of public space usage, the right to the city, and the role that art and open participation has to do as an active agent of change. The project has picked up quite a bit of traction, with interventions in Madrid. Several other Spanish cities, such as Cadiz or Cuenca, have picked up on our mission. We also reach out to places like Washington DC and are planning interventions across Latin America.”

Gracias, Daniel! Who knew Ana traveled so much? Seems like she's everywhere. Thanks for checking in and sharing this story. Keep me posted! For more Ana Botella photos, check their Flickr page.