Canvas of Culture

In the streets of Santiago, social conscience and public expression thrive through art

By: Leila Beem Núñez

Photos: Hanna Curlette, David Sharabani

London-born photographer David Sharabani’s original idea was to travel throughout South America. After spending six months in Buenos Aires where he learned the art of stencil graffiti, his next project was focused on visually documenting the street art scene of the continent and the colorful individuals behind it.

But his plans changed when he arrived in the Chilean capital of Santiago four years ago.

“I was in shock at the quality of art there,” Sharabani says. “I realized people had always mentioned Perú, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, but no one had ever mentioned Chile. I realized I couldn’t do it justice just skimping through and moving on.”

For about a year, Sharabani, also known as Lord K2, photographed street pieces and artists he found around the city. He found and photographed an abundance of art, from tags to stencils to larger-scale murals. In his resulting book, “Street Art Santiago,” he compiles over 200 photographs and 80 interviews with urban artists.

“There was a lot to document, and it just felt right to continue to pursue documentation there,” Sharabani says.

For many, the scope of urban art in Chile’s largest metropolitan area may be as surprising as it was to Sharabani. While the mention of Chilean street art perhaps most often conjures up the image of Valparaíso, with its old-world charm and cobblestoned streets filled with vibrant art seemingly around every corner, Santiago’s urban art scene is as sprawling as the city itself. For better or worse, Santiago’s street art scene continues to flourish, weaving itself into the identity and everyday life of the city.

Much of the muted impression of Santiago as a street art capital likely has to do with the size and nature of both cities, Sharabani explains. Valparaíso’s smaller size lends itself to more highly concentrated areas of murals and graffiti, particularly those most often frequented by tourists. He says this is why Santiago is often unnoticed and overshadowed in the dialogue about Chilean street art, despite having a significantly higher number of artists living there.

“Valparaiso is very picturesque, kind of an old city that looks good in the urban context, and it gets Instagrammed a lot, and put on blogs,” Sharabani says. “People seem to think that Valparaiso is the place, but the truth is that Santiago is a hell of a lot bigger; it’s a much, much bigger city, and it’s not as condensed. There is more room for graffiti. You just have to know where to find it.”

Some in the city know exactly where to look. Santiago native Claudio Cuevas, cofounder of the duo Urban Art Scl Tour, Santiago’s first graffiti and street art tour company, takes locals and visitors alike through the art-rich neighborhoods scattered throughout the city. He goes by the name Jeinst in the streets, where he is a graffiti artist who works in Wildstyle, a complex style characterized by voluminous, vivid interlocked letters and shapes unique to the individual who creates them. Cuevas, who quit his job as art director at a local public relations firm just two months ago, now finds work in painting various establishments and objects around the city on commission, as people need or want them. For Cuevas, making art in Santiago is a way of life.

It’s like taking it from the gallery and bringing it to your streetcorner or house.”

“I wanted to start doing these tours because of the need I saw in people to know more and the desire to want to be closer to this culture that is often elusive, unknown and highly stigmatized,” Cuevas says. “Lots of times people think that only delinquents without jobs do this, but the truth is that it’s the opposite; it’s very intelligent people doing it, from various professions and walks of life, who spend their hard-earned money in the streets.”

Cuevas starts off the tour outside of Santiago’s Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center with a mural done by Brigada Ramona Parra, a collective famous for helping bring socialist candidate Salvador Allende into power through its propaganda, and later defying Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime by painting in public spaces. The mural, like many of the group’s murals found all around Santiago, features working class Chileans. Cuevas says they chose to start the tour with this work because it gives people a sense of just how long street art has been a part of Santiago’s culture. He added that such protest art remains a fundamental element of the city’s street art scene.

“The political brigades mark a precedent for new generations. Chile has a very high muralist conscience, and this makes young people here see it as something that is their own that they can use as a sort of manifestation, either political or personal,” Cuevas says. “There are lots of young people who paint against social inequalities, generating highly politically-charged compositions, about things like corporations and education.”

A couple sits in front of a mural by the crew Brigada Ramona Parra, found in the city’s Centroarea, where Cuevas begins his tour. The mural depicts working class Chileans and is an exampleof the city’s and country’s protest art culture founded in years of political unrest, a traditionwhich continues with many of today’s young artists who take to the streets.

Cuevas later takes tourists through Santiago’s Bellas Artes, where larger-than-life murals by the Chilean artist Inti can be found on the sides of buildings. He also pays a visit to the artsy Barrio Lastarria, and to the vibrant neighborhood of Bellavista, where one of the largest concentrations of muralistic works as well as graffiti in the city can be found gracing the walls of businesses and homes.

Permission to cover these areas is generally easy. Sharabani says an artist might have to knock on two or three doors at most before getting an OK. He adds that even local authorities don’t tend to mind, and that once or twice he painted with police standing just down the road.

“A lot of the areas the artists paint are dilapidated walls that aren’t clean,” Sharabani says. “Often they have tags on them and stuff, so who wouldn’t want their walls painted with a beautiful piece? It’s not like they’re knocking on people’s houses who have got clean walls. If you’re painting something beautiful, the neighborhood appreciates it.”

Art on the walls of the city has been increasingly present and welcomed, even by the state. In 2009, to combat the deterioration of many of the city’s buildings, the city of Santiago began the project “Museo a Cielo Abierto en San Miguel” (Open-Air Museum in San Miguel. San Miguel’s apartment blocks often looked gray, worn and monotonous in scheme. The community suddenly became a showcase for local and international muralists and graffitists. Today, over 40 large-scale murals and several smaller ones done by over 70 artists make up the outdoor museum.

The municipality has set up this project to make it more beautiful, and the murals there are very, very large, and they tend to invite the local artists – and international artists, in fact – to paint there. And in a way, it’s an honor to be selected to paint there, and the quality of work is very, very good,” Sharabani says.

Click to enlarge images

Cuevas says that because of poor architectural planning and rapid metropolitan expansion, there is often discord among buildings and walls, and empty, gray spaces.

“Santiago has grown and evolved greatly over time and has gone through lots of different phases that have not always followed the previous pattern,” Cuevas says. “So the art serves to give these areas forms and colors.”

While many in Santiago welcome the murals and graffiti that continue to appear and spread in its various neighborhoods, others also wish there was not a need to cover so many spaces up. Cristobal Peña of BellaBike, a company in Bellavista that offers bicycle tours of Santiago, Valparaíso, and other surrounding areas and attractions, says he feels frustrated that the need to combat tags even exists.

"Here people use it a lot as a way to combat tag graffiti, the ugly graffiti, the scribbles you see,” Peña says. “Lots of times we can’t have nice, plain surfaces around here because people come and scribble all over them. Behind all that graffiti, there often exists very beautiful architecture, houses over 100 years old. That is the original artistic value of Bellavista, and it’s covered up.”

But for people like Cuevas, artistic expression on the streets is a way of bringing spaces of creativity out in the open for people of all classes in a fairly easy manner – a luxury and liberty that Chileans for decades did not really have.

“Aerosol cans are easily accessed, which makes it so that anyone with artistic drive can acquire them and create their works on the streets,” Cuevas says. “This way they generate contemplative spaces for the people of the city, and bring art to their homes, art that is often elusive. It’s like taking it from the gallery and bringing it to your street corner or house.