A TRIP AROUND THE WORLD
Since 2012, Vertigo Graffiti has traveled the world telling stories, creating universes, and discovering realities through narratives that eventually became murals. Thanks to these experiences, our team has established itself as one of the most impactful and internationally renowned artistic collectives in Latin America.
We invite you to take a visual tour through the last 14 years of our lives.
Prisma Afro, Cartagena, 2012. Artists: Word, Ecks, Zas, Skida, Ospen, Yurika, Dexs.
Cities are not postcards. They are not the stillness of frozen landscapes. A city is a territory of struggle between the visible and the invisible. The former is embodied in the people, architecture, and forms that inhabit it; the latter is shaped by the ideas, intentions, and desires that give it life. In its streets, the physical and tangible phenomenon can be disorienting: the substantial silhouettes that we are—the flesh and blood passersby—attract undue attention and distract. But they are not alone. It is in the invisible arena—its emotional realm—where a city truly begins to exist. And it exists only because of its tense and contradictory nature. Because of its conflict.
More than people, Pessoa would say, we are symbols. Symbols brimming with both doubts and convictions, judgments and appetites, anxieties and dreams. Dual beings bouncing between their nature and their private and public spaces. In the private sphere, everything is under control and restraint. Enclosed in caves and apartment buildings, we feel safer, but we are less powerful. Beings on the verge of emerging, waiting to step into the public sphere to, voluntarily or as a mere inertial gesture, clash, protect, or impose, thus fulfilling our reason for being and that of the city.
The Kiss of the Invisible, Bogotá, 2013. Artists: Word, Ecks, Zas, Yurika, Jade (2013), Word, Yurika (2021).
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A city and its citizens only truly exist in these encounters, whether fleeting or enduring, frivolous or deadly. And the results of this communion—violent or consensual—define and guide them. The reactions they provoke, the visible confronting the invisible, constitute reality and imagination. The savage and the civilized do not represent the end of a confrontation, but rather its process: the triumph or defeat of the emotional over the physical. Everything happens outside. The street is both witness and arbiter.
Lost Generation, Miami, 2017. Artists: Word and Ecks.
Emotions and people leave traces. They are ways of marking territories or children's games to avoid getting lost. Everyone traverses the city from top to bottom, almost always along predictable paths, leaving behind a personal trail; like in those artistic actions by Richard Long in which he walked—again and again—through grasses to create shapes, altering the landscape. A profound reflection and apt premonition of daily life in the city. We are predictable and conservative beings in our routes, and with each step we leave a chain of footprints that show us the way back to the tranquility and hope of home. The irrevocable daily routine of going out with the desire to return safely.
Shared Gaze, Antwerp, 2018. Artists: Word, Ecks, Zas and Yurika.
Of course, not all traces—as the hunter of the beast well knows—are the same. Subtle as crumbs scattered on the ground, forceful as the squeal of brakes, or symbolic as a paint splatter, they emerge in the contemporary city. These common and controversial stains, which appear and disappear, are nothing more than traces of another. Therein lies their fundamental importance: the paint splatter reflects someone who, like any other pedestrian, exists and inhabits a space in the city. They are present and they exist: a claim of existence and continuity.
Wild Reading, Ottawa, 2018. Artists: Word, and Ecks.
Goya: The Golden Fishmonger, Cartagena, 2019. Artists: Word, Yurika and Ecks.
Human Seeds, Amman, 2019. Artists: Word, Yurika and Ecks.
Often misunderstood, the stain is rejected. This is hardly surprising when one of the ways the city connects—when it sickens and languishes, yet continues to grow—is through rejection of others. The stain is a reminder of a body and spirit beyond each individual. It is an interruption of the illusion of solitude: that widely accepted, yet mendacious, advertisement. No one is truly alone in the city. The stains on the wall immediately dispel the notion of the solitary and vain figure. Someone has already been there. Every corner belongs to dozens of past lives.
The stain becomes political when it happens in the street. Without exception, like everything that occurs in the city before, against, or for others, it presupposes and proposes a potential conversation. Politics in its most basic and relevant dimension. The stain is the monologue—one of many—from which an eventual dialogue springs. Whether a solitary stain or a formed stain—also known and valued as a mural—it refers to a matter of debate, a position that can be dismissed or applauded. Politics fragmented into atomic particles. Murals, now so relevant and so common, are for this reason and above all the beginning of a public conversation, a multicolored mark of one or more disputes of emotions, appetites, and desires now visible, palpable, and evident.
Coffee plantation childhood, Istanbul, 2019. Artists: Word, Yurika and Ecks.
Brotherhood, Istanbul, 2019. Artists: Word, Yurika and Ecks.
The mural is a threshold between the physical essence and the emotional substance of the city. Its constitutive duality. It appears to give substance to the invisible and transcend mere skin. A visual purgatory in which passersby and pilgrims are confronted with their sins and virtues. The gospel and the whip. The mural interrupts the predictable path of the citizen by confronting them with an image that, whether through indifference or antipathy, transforms every journey. A silent companion at every step.
Walkers, San Salvador, 2019. Artists: Word, Yurika, Ecks, Darwin and Abraham.
The Embrace, San Salvador, 2019. Artists: Word, Yurika, Ecks, Darwin and Abraham.
The struggle of the mural and its creator is not a clamor for attention, but a sensitive struggle to disrupt the everyday. Gray and flatness represent ease and tameness in the city; color and form represent effort and commitment. These are calls for a nascent dialogue that, drawing on the imagination born from the image, invites us to recognize our own identity—those thorns—through an expression that is foreign, yet familiar and imbued with warmth.
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Party bagpiper, Sao Paulo 2019. Artists: Word, Yurika and Ecks.
The mural's image confines a universe. In the street, nothing is as it seems. As Santiago Castro Pulido states in his series of works, Invisible Words, everything that inhabits public space is transfigured. Nothing is direct and precise in the city, and in this way, the image ends up embodying hundreds of natures and messages. This is the skill of the mural's author and creator: starting from an established narrative (a past and present narrative entity), he constructs a created narrative (the future version of that narrative). The word precedes the image and imposes upon it a broad corridor of transit.
The Origin of Hands, Madrid Metro. 2021 Artists: Word and Yurika.
Often, the artist's whim and desire for recognition prevent them from seeing this reality, and in this misguided way, they seek to impose an image alien to their surroundings. The mural's stain is reduced to irrelevance. "My style" and "my work," they say, knowing full well that in the street such possessives are as ridiculous as they are useless.
Cumbiamberos, Izmir (2021). Artists: Word and Yurika.
The image is born like those baby turtles crawling helplessly on the sand, abandoned by their mothers and easy prey for hungry predators, until they reach the sea: an entity that immediately begins to belong to others. In the street, the private is always suspect. An image, when it triumphs, persists over time, not because of the artist's will or investment, but as a recognition by a mass that engages with it, embraces it, and nourishes it. Time is the mural's chalice; to endure is its shamed desire.
Essential Colombia, Seoul (2021). Artists: Word and Yurika.
The mural is the result of a careful and delicate exercise in observation. It is the artist's duty, if their intention is to endure, to make their inner landscapes—as the Colombian muralist Ricardo Vásquez Navas proposes in his work—a representation of an external landscape. This process entails a responsibility: to examine the inside and the outside, and above all, to make them coincide in the mural.
Children's Game, San Salvador (2022). Artists: Word and Darwin.
This exercise in observation acknowledges, from the outset, that not all cities are the same city, nor are all neighborhoods the same neighborhood, but also that only through a personal gaze can this unusual territory we inhabit acquire a human character. The gaze serves as a tool of attraction through which the artist reconciles both worlds under a single formal sensibility. His unique and private visual proposal—anchored in references and precedents, of course—is what he presents to an anonymous, yet discerning, public.
Our epic, Quito Metro (2023). Artists: Word, Yurika and Raúl Ayala.
Empty embraces, Bogotá (2024). Artists: Word and Yurika.
Extraordinary Migrations, Mexico City, 2026. Artist: Word.
Therefore, as lawyers are taught in law school, the more one can predict the jury (the passersby), the greater the chances of their approval. Such prediction, of course, is not palmistry. Rather, it is the result of accumulated information, of prior dialogue with neighbors and communities, providing an emotional snapshot that serves as a guiding element for the artist and a cardinal map of their perspectives. A solitary mural perishes with the first drizzle. Dialogue must be provoked.
The murals are a gesture of resistance against the social threat of virtuality. In a world where the main political debates are owned by the proprietors of the major social media platforms, the discussion must return to the public sphere and its essential stage: the street. It is no exaggeration to say that, currently, matters of interest to society have been conveniently packaged. The currency of consciences. The manufacture of public opinion has weakened it and made it susceptible to manipulation and distortion that have jeopardized once-accepted concepts, such as democracy, and have made coexistence among neighbors even more difficult. In any case, knowing how the most savage capitalism operates, it is unlikely that the remedy for this malaise in public debate will emerge from these same networks or their use. Nothing will change. So controlled and so obvious, they will not sign a sentence that reduces their power and reach. Greed is a tumor that grows by feeding on the body it inhabits. But this state is revocable: its methods are so obvious that therein lie its weaknesses.
A likely remedy appears before us: to return to the streets to abandon virtuality. To experience the city firsthand and, by lifting our brows from the screen, to see the world from our own autonomous perspective. To choose living over consuming. To grasp, through our senses, a reality that has slipped away due to the wasted hours of virtuality. A street depends on the footsteps that shape and define it; Richard Long again. Footsteps that subject its structures and walls to emotional specters and warm its beams with gentle breaths. The voice must inhabit the public sphere to revive it. To recover the tensions, the contradictions, and the agreements that give substance to a city and its citizens. To speak among ourselves again about what is important—something so simple, yet sometimes so unattainable. The spectacle promoted by social media casts a facade over what is relevant, flooding everything and all the time with nonsense, advertisements, and defamation.
To reclaim what truly matters, we must also draw upon those traces of humanity—those splashes of color—that embody public issues and sensibilities, and which stand as a form of resistance and friction. The world cannot be contained on a flat screen.
Narrative and imagery in public spaces, as they always have, will spark those much-needed and fundamental conversations. More observation, more listening, more artists, and more murals. In that order. Murals will save the city with their urgent and poignant calls to reality, and in doing so, they will serve as a reminder that the other, and each one of us, is still here. That we are not—for now—avatars.
(Stains on the wall, text written by Camilo Fidel López on the occasion of the Vértigo Graffiti retrospective at the Gabriel García Márquez cultural center of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, September 2025)