word
graffiti artist
During the last decade and a half, Bogotá has become a random and chaotic scenario where graffiti emerges as a trigger for communication and dialogue among its almost ten million inhabitants. Word, also known as Cazdos, witness and protagonist of this transformation, although he is a master of Fine Arts at the University of the Andes, carried out his preliminary exercises in painting by writing graffiti in Bogotá. As a teenager, he learned first-hand from his colleagues Ecks and Yurika, to read, move around and transform the city by inscribing the signature of his pseudonym, in a frenetic way, in the street. Bogota all day long. And all night.
Word has devoted himself fully to the closed investigation of graffiti as an elusive and fickle phenomenon in the city. As a researcher, he has developed virtual and physical spaces of diffusion like the now extinct -but relevant- graffiti magazine Objetivo Fanzine. His taste for research has also been evident in several academic investigations, group exhibitions and curatorial projects, which deal with the tensions present between art and the city.
Word is a specialist in weaving the seams that link urban history with the plastic arts. His work has focused on developing issues that question the uses of public space; the tensions of human relations in the city and; graffiti, as a performatic action. The practice of street art has served as a prosthesis for this artist to embody multiple dialogues, exercises and mappings in public space that have been reflected in murals, both in depressed areas of Colombia such as the Orquídeas de Agua Blanca neighborhood in southwestern Colombia, as well as in the pyrotechnic and spectacular sector of Wynwood in the city of Miami.
For the artist, the fragile, transitory and ephemeral exercises learned in the street have been important inputs as orientation and motive for most of his personal studio work, where he works on painting, drawing and in-situ installations. In his serial painting exercises such as Frontiers and Borders 2, he explores inflexible steel as a rigid support that negotiates its static nature when it comes into contact with abstract painting: conceiving scenarios of dressed up tides, afternoons or savannah dawns, which in any case seek to capture the momentary fragility of light, as well as human traces in the city (instantaneous monuments unobserved by most).
Cazdos is a creator who interprets reality without the excuse of trying to find answers: the most powerful -and fertile- maxim of human contemplation.
YURIKA
graffiti artist
La responsabilidad inevitable de un artista es trazar puentes entre dos mundos que permanecen -inexplicablemente- separados. Siendo un adolescente en la cruda Bogotá de los años noventa, Yurika encontró refugio en los sonidos toscos y contundentes del hardcore. Al finalizar cada concierto o fiesta, regresaba a su casa y observaba con curiosidad e interés la presencia intermitente de grafitis que emulaban el estilo Wild Style, incubado, décadas atrás, en la costa este norteamericana. Su naturaleza salvaje y provocadora, de la que fue testigo, se le hizo inevitable. Bastaron un par de meses para que los trazos del artista -en vísperas- empezaran a aparecer por todo la ciudad. Luego de merodear por años diferentes sonidos y músicas, un regreso sorpresivo a su gusto y afición por los ritmos autóctonos colombianos, hizo posible el encuentro inesperado que marcaría, en adelante, su carrera: la cumbia y el grafiti.
La cumbia, el extraordinario género musical que comprende y amalgama los ritmos ancestrales que atraviesan la región Caribe colombiana (hijos de las intersecciones culturales que trajo el descubrimiento, conquista y colonización de América) con sus percusiones vibrantes y anécdotas convertidas en verso, se convirtieron para Yurika en una cartografía que determinaría su obra pictórica; una deriva personal e íntima a la que el artista ha denominado “Cumbigenismo”.
Quizás fue su decisión de pintar una María Mulata (un ave mitológica castigada en su colorido por su vanidad) en el epicentro histórico de Cartagena en el año 2013, la que despertó esa necesidad de comprender el ejercicio artístico a partir de los ritmos de cumbias y de las raíces mestizas de la Colombia. A manera de augurio dedicó esta creación mural, que se funde con la arquitectura colonial de la ciudad, a su hija recién nacida: Cielo Celeste. La imagen del pájaro fantástico se convertiría en un lugar de peregrinaje para todos aquellos que se sintieran atraídos por la vertiginosidad del color y las formas en la obra. El mural, de plumas encendidas y anhelante vuelo, parece sembrar una dentellada colorida en el inquietante relato conservador de una ciudad legendaria que ha negado por siglos el vientre mixto en el que se gestó: el afrodescendiente y el indígena.
Yurika es un mestizo y por eso su deliberado irrespeto por las formas unitarias y comunes, la fiereza de su propuesta se hace incluso apreciable en su forma de vestir: camisas, faldas bordadas y holgados tenis de basquetbolista manchados de pintura, consagran su decisión de ser él mismo. Sin excepciones. Esta puesta en escena, también se refleja en su estilo de pintura, atiborrada de trazos, gestos y colores sobrepuestos, en donde se hacen evidente su llamado a la exuberancia y al ritmo: horizontes sobresaltados que confunden e intrigan la mirada.
En plena temporada navideña del año 2019, Yurika alcanzaría un logro inspirador para su carrera y su propuesta profesional, pintando un mural de más de dieciocho pisos en Sao Paulo, Brasil: la imagen de un esbelto gaitero colorido que le susurra vida a la cumbia que toca, descubre con astucia las herencias musicales y representaciones grafiti que el artista reclama en sus obras. La vida como un suceso rítmico y la pintura como una insinuación que seduce; un baile fijo que comprende un movimiento detenido en la memoria.
director
Camilo Fidel
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As is well known, every voyage must have a reporter. Its function is none other than to prevent the events - the insignificant and the revealing ones - from sinking into oblivion. This has been, from the beginning, Camilo Fidel's job. A lawyer and university professor who learned in 2008 of the most intriguing and powerful rumor in New York City: graffiti. Without knowing anything about it, with his friend Alejandro, they decided to dig into the possibility of finding a new and different path for the impressive culture that had already been going on for decades in their hometown, Bogota. Thus Vertigo Graffiti was born.
Although it took him a couple of years to realize the immensity of the artistic practice, which more than once ran over him, Camilo Fidel was stubborn enough to carefully observe everything that was happening around him and, beyond that, he knew how to retain the substance of the words of the group of graffiti artists who would eventually become his dear colleagues. After more than a few setbacks, he ended up learning about the palpitations of graffiti and with the wild enthusiasm that defines him, he moved forward like someone who enters a dark cave with only an oil lamp to see his footsteps. Since 2008, the flame has not ceased to light.
Thanks to his videos and documentaries, today it is possible to visit the memory of Vertigo Graffiti, from its first exercises to the last ones. Camilo Fidel never stopped noticing stories and turning them into reality (together with the delicate eye of Nicolás Fernández). Together they created an alternative reality called Los Amateurs, which tried to explain everything that has happened with this evolution that began in 2008. In 2023, Camilo ended up losing his modesty completely - just as the graffiti artists taught him - and wrote a book - half anecdote, half lesson - that tries to give merit to all the events and experiences that he has witnessed and, not infrequently, have left him perplexed. He decided to call it "The Mechanics of Vertigo", after discarding many other names. In this publication he reveals the process of creating Vertigo and his insistence on painting stories, the definitive approach (some would call it the concept) that has given rise to more than a dozen large-scale murals that still stand today on three continents. All these years together, like a hill of dry leaves, show that the will of time was enough to understand that with patience everything that was thought to have disappeared, emerges again. Its time and place have come.
pez
graffiti artist
In 1999, the streets of Barcelona began their early morning hours with smiling, round-eyed fish appearing on walls, shop curtains, and fences. In the company of his friends, Pez would go out to paint the city that would become -over the years- the cradle of several internationally renowned artists. Undoubtedly the young generous Catalan with a ponytail, would have a place of honour in this generation of creators incubated in the ramblas and narrow streets of the city capital.
As the years went by, Pez's fish would appear all over the world and his happy style, his most promising creation, would be increasingly recognized; whether at an exhibition of his works in Japan, at a "mapping" in Wynwood or in the industrial zone of Bogota. Although his works have reached an infinite number of latitudes, it cannot be overlooked that Pez's heart is divided between his native Catalonia and the intense Bogota where he lives with his family a little more than six months a year. Pez comes and goes around the world, something that no longer seems to surprise him and has become his most agitated reality. At the moment he is preparing a personal exhibition in the United States and last year he celebrated 20 years of his career with his famous friends of urban art in a prestigious gallery in London.
Pez's prolific work has a deep and relevant message. Apart from the delicacy of its lines and finishes and the versatility of its fish, which have even decorated the bow of a ship in the Caribbean, Pez seems to raise his voice to a reality that rewards wisdom about the happiness of men and darkness about the color in the streets. Fortunately, there are still many smiles for the Catalan, much colour, and many friends. Perhaps these, his most precious treasure, apart from his wife and two children.
NICOCINQ
photographer and editor
The blisters were throbbing in his back. The angry sun of Taganga Bay had been hurting the young photographer's skin for a couple of days. Squatting, and not letting go of his Nikon D300s, he framed Ecks as he drew a line on the boat, docked in the middle of the beach. That night, he couldn't sleep, the pain from the burns kept him awake. He turned on his camera, checked the footage and picked out the best pictures. The next morning, in the early hours of the morning, he was supposed to leave for a beach in Tayrona Park, where he would take pictures of a couple of models for Doce Nueve; a brand of Vertigo graffiti bikinis that never took off.
Vertigo's story has been lucky enough to have a camera ready to freeze an action or reveal an artist's gesture - while he is immersed in his creation. That perspective, from the delicacy and commitment, has corresponded, not infrequently, to the talented Nicolás, the person in charge of documenting the team's descents and ascents; he was responsible for the first Vertigo videos for the Sprite brand, the night photo of Prisma Afro (the team's first large-format mural) and the portraits of the Aguablanca grandmothers that were printed to watch over the young people at risk of dying from violence.
Today, without the passing of the years having undermined his will, he is in charge of filming and editing the documentaries of the Siamese project of Vertigo Graffiti: the audiovisual production company Los Amateurs. Surely, there are many stories to be told through Nico's careful look: the brave photographer with the blisters on his back. The visual memory of this racket.