12ozProphet

My good friend Pablo Medina took a trip to Buenos Aires back in July. The constant documentarian, Pablos passion for the graphic arts of latin America have been a constant muse. And every time he goes back south of the US border he comes back with incredible stories and photos. He wanted to share some from his latest trip.
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TEC & FASE / Street Art in Buenos Aires
By Pablo A. Medina

In a neighborhood called Colegiales, which is the beginning of the outskirts of Buenos Aires, lives
TEC, a street artist who paints expressive and minimalistic murals of fish and other animals and
hybrids of animals. TEC is a part of FASE, a street art collective who have an unignorable presence
in the local landscape.

I arrived by taxi to TEC’s apartment which is clearly distinguishable from a couple of
blocks away by its facade covered in a mural painted by a bunch of the members of FASE. TEC
greeted me at his front door and walked me through his apartment.

It’s a two story duplex that’s classical on the outside and modern on the inside. TEC lives there with his girlfriend, Victoria and
Rogelio, a happy black labrador retriever. His art which you see on just about every wall, brings
bright, primary colors to the neutral space. Even the refrigerator is covered in doodles, tags and
stickers.

In a cordial Argentinian manner, he invited me into the kitchen where we talked about his
artistic past, while he cooked a lunch of pasta with a beef sauce. TEC studied graphic design at the
University of Buenos Aires which led him to understand and appreciate the power of simple graph-
ic images.

While at university, he mentioned a trip that he took to Barcelona when he was nineteen.
This was in the early 90s when many European cities were screaming with graffiti. He was deeply
impressed by how graffiti wove itself so seamlessly into the city. He took pictures of much of the
Barcelona graffiti and brought it back with him to Buenos Aires. He shared the pictures with his
friends from college and soon after his return, they began their own assault on abandoned walls
and buildings commonly seen in Buenos Aires. At that point they were mostly tagging and piecing,
mimicking what TEC had seen in Barcelona.

Then came 2001.
Argentina’s economy imploded. Banks froze assets, unemployment rose to 20%, the presi-
dent, Fernando de la Rua, resigned, and desperate citizens resorted to rioting to manifest their an-
gers. Argentina was at one point, the tenth wealthiest country in the world, so this type of economic
collapse was especially unnerving to its citizens. One form of citizen rebellion came in the form of
graffiti. Not tagging, or piecing, but protest slogans. Slogans that said things like…”GOING BACK
TO THIS BANK MEANS GETTING RAPED AGAIN” and ”ARGENTINIAN BANKS ARE
THIEVES.” These graffiti slogans were on every corner in Buenos Aires and conveyed an aggres-
sion and overall negativity that was prevalent amongst the minds of many citizens. The crisis was
an economic apocalypse, with graffiti as the desperate voice of the public. Again, the members of
FASE decided to take to the streets and begin to counter these grey, pessimistic slogans with an
aesthetic optimism of cartoon-like characters in bright green and blue and yellow colors. These
playful images of extra terrestrial-like, one eyed smiley faces were a counter-punch to those grey
somber graffiti slogans. TEC told me that the public response to these murals was very positive.

The murals cut through the darkness of the times and encouraged a sense of relief amongst the
citizens. The 2001 crisis and the subsequent, positive public response to their work was deeply im-
pacting to the sensibilities of the FASE crew. It gave them a push of confidence to continue making
these bright and light-hearted images.

Eight years later, FASE has continued to use this approach of bringing brightness to envi-
ronments in other ways. Children especially love the surreal quality of their work and a couple of
years ago, FASE proposed to a children’s hospital that they paint its walls to brighten the spaces.
They then invited kids to help paint and the whole thing turned into a neighborhood event. The
painting of the hospitals proved a big hit. As any great artist knows, when you do something that
works, do it more. So they held more mural painting events and named them “Expression Ses-
sions,” which are community street art festivals that invite families and children to help paint
murals on walls of unclaimed spaces. FASE have held a number of these Expression Sessions with
hundreds of people from the community attending.

Using art as a means to improve the lives of the community has become a philosophy for
FASE. This is how the FASE collective distinguishes itself from the many other traditional graf-
fiti artists in the city. As TEC and I drove around the neighborhoods in and around Colegiales, our
conversation returned to the theme of traditional graffiti. TEC was torn about the idea of it. He un-
derstands that it’s his roots. With his trips to Europe, it influenced him to make the art in the street
that he makes today. But he seemed disillusioned by its redundancy. By developing art beyond the
limitations of graffiti, FASE could reach more people and more naturally use their work as a tool to
improve the quality of life of their neighborhoods. While mediocre graffiti covers the walls of the
streets in cookie-cutter pieces that speak only to other graf artists, FASE’s work does more. It en-
tices curiosities. It lets people discover their own imaginations. It facilitates community activities.
It encourages optimism. And it brings a smile to the face of a five year old who happens to walk by
one of their big bouncy characters.
For more on TEC, visit http://www.tecalbum.com/
For more on CHU (Another FASE artists), visit http://www.studiochu.tv/street-art.htm
For more on Argentina’s 2001 financial crisis, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_eco-
nomic_crisis_(1999-2002)