Extract from the book: “Street Art and Democracy in Latin America, Studies of the

Americas”, by O. Dabene. 2020.

Chapter 3
Bogotá: Public Space Between Appropriation and Deliberation
Many consider Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, a mecca for graffti writers.1 The walls of the city
are entirely tagged or painted, from far distant deprived southern or western districts to northern
upper-middle-class neighborhoods and the historical center. There seems to be no limit to what
the different communities involved can do: political militants writing the acronyms of their party,
hip-hop fans drawing letters or tagging their initials, football team supporters delimitating their
territories with their colors, street artists painting large walls, spraying stencils or disseminating
stickers and posters, and so on.

This explosion is recent. Although graffti in Bogotá dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, it boomed
during the 2010s, when three consecutive leftist mayors introduced a paradigmatic change. No
longer considered a nuisance, on the contrary graffti gained the status of artistic expression. The
city’s administrations started to offer incentives and hired artists to paint walls. To some, this
policy orientation triggered an intolerable invasion of public space. At some point, a complaint
was fled against the mayor. Meanwhile, thousands of artists took to the streets, thinking it was safe
to paint freely. Yet in 2011, the police shot one of them, sparking a debate over the necessity of
regulating the practice. As a consequence of these disruptive events, Bogotá’s authorities crafted
a piece of legislation in 2012 and then opened a dialogue with the artists in order to raise their legal
awareness, examine ways of implementing the new rules and discuss a new policy of incentives.

This chapter examines Bogotá’s unique and short-lived experiment in collaborative governance.
It stresses its timid success and its more obvious shortcomings.

Historical Background: Graffti and Street Art Among Political Turmoil.

The history of graffti in Bogotá is long and rich. Political graffti frst appeared in the context of
massive student mobilizations at the end of the 1960s. The National University was the center of
the contestation and wall painting fourished on campus. The messages were revolutionary, often
supporting the nascent guerilla groups. As Benavides (2005, p. 55) put it, the students used graffti
“as an alternative form of subaltern writing to construct a narrative of resistance.”

Why was there such an urgent need to voice dissent? A brief mention of Colombia’s history will
help understand this surge of protests, which cannot be reduced to emulation of the global student
movement that started in Paris, France, in May 1968, and inspired many stencil-makers. In 1948,
following a rally in Bogotá, the populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaítan was executed, which triggered
a massive mobilization known as Bogotazo. The capital was sacked and the following ten years
were marked by widespread violence, leaving 200,000 dead. A military dictatorship (1953–1957)
progressively put a fragile end to the massacres. In 1956, the two traditional parties, Liberal and
Conservative, who dominated much of Colombian politics during the nineteenth century and the
frst half of the twentieth, agreed on a power-sharing formula.
They would alternate in power every 4 years for a period of 16 years. This form of transition to
democracy based on an elite settlement was praised by many scholars as an exemplary way to
stabilize divided countries (Peeler 1985; Higley and Gunther 1991). Dix (1980) even made the
case for Colombia being a consociational democracy. Yet, it did not take long for the same scholars
to acknowledge that the “National Front” regime, as they called it in Colombia, operated at the
expense of leftist parties who were not part of the initial negotiation.

As a reaction, many guerilla movements developed that captured the attention of idealistic and
politicized young Colombians upset by the absence of social reforms. The M-19, in particular, was
popular among students. This guerilla group was created after the 19 April 1970 presidential
election resulted in the allegedly fraudulent election of Misael Pastrana. Political messages
expressing frustration over representative democracy started to accompany the demonstrations.

The protests, however, never built up to create a movement similar to those that prospered in
Argentina and Chile during the 1970s military regimes. Interestingly and quite innovatively, the
M-19 also used graffti on the walls to engage in dialogue with the public. In 1976, they even went
so far as to organize a kind of consultation. Following a dubious prosecution, they publicly asked
whether to execute the labor union leader José Raquel Mercado. The walls were then covered with
“yes” or “no.” It was clearly impossible to identify a majority, but the M-19 killed him anyway.
During the 1980s, Bogotá became quite a dangerous place.

Drug cartels imposed terror, using massive bomb attacks. In 1989, for instance, the Medellin cartel
activated a bomb on a commercial fight and destroyed an offcial building in downtown Bogotá,
causing many deaths. In such a context, painting walls was an act of defance and resistance,
considered a nuisance by the authorities. Yet, they had other pressing security issues to address.
In 1984, then president Belisario Betancur tried to use the growing fame of street art to unify the
nation in defense of peace. He asked Colombians to paint doves on the walls of the city. As a
reaction, an artist called Luis “Keshava” Liévano painted the slogan “No más paloMAS,”2 in a
clear rebuke of the offcial peace negotiations President Betancur was tentatively carrying out.

Marks on the walls became more artistic. Instead of simply writing political messages, fgurative
paintings started to invade the city, echoing a global evolution. Hip-hop culture was on the rise.
As a reaction, the 1990s saw new attention given to young people. The frst elected mayor to
introduce a change was Antanas Mockus, who served twice (1995–1998 and 2001–2004).

Very much concerned by the lack of “civic culture” in the city and keen to promote political
inclusion, he designed a policy to favor younger generations.4 Most notably, he created a rock
festival (Rock al parquet) and launched a program called “young kids as society’s sewers” (Jóvenes
tejidores de Sociedad). Mockus’s successor Enrique Peñalosa (1998–2001, reelected on 15
October 2015) also tried to work with the young. In the mid-1990s, French artist Nemo
disseminated stencils in Bogotá representing a black man with an umbrella. He would inspire a
generation of stencil-makers who quietly invaded public spaces. When the left frst won the
municipal elections in 2003, they introduced a paradigmatic change. Bogotá’s mayor Lucho
Garzón (2004–2007) launched an initiative called “Free walls” (Muros libres), associated with his
program “No indifference to young people” (Jóvenes sin indiferencia), legitimizing street art not
only as a generational expression, but also as an artistic one. It was the frst offcial program
supporting graffti.

The two succeeding leftist mayors, Samuel Moreno (2008–2011) and Gustavo Petro (2012–2015),
would follow his path. Wall painting was by then considered a way to improve the quality of urban
life. Street artists earned respect as their work was celebrated. As a consequence, street art boomed
during the 2000s, with a variety of techniques and contents.

As a dominant trend, it is fair to say that street art became more politicized during Armando Uribe’s
two terms as president of Colombia (2002–2010). His rightist inclinations inspired tough policies
aimed at reducing insecurity. Many human rights activists and even young children living in rural
areas were the collateral victims of military or paramilitary operations targeting the guerillas and
their suspected followers. Many scandals erupted during this period, provoking protests that the
artists were keen to embrace and promote throughout the country.

The way street art was apprehended in Bogotá changed dramatically when two events forced the
administrations to reconsider their policies. In 2007, a group of angry inhabitants from a northern
middle-class neighborhood5 sued the city hall with a “popular action” procedure.6 Based on the
Colombian Constitution, they argued that wall painters were preventing them from enjoying a
sound public space. On 16 July 2010, a judge came to a decision, based on Article 82 of the
Constitution,7 acknowledging the citizens’ rights and ordering the mayor to protect the integrity
of public space. The mayor had no choice but to elaborate a legal framework setting legal limits
to the use of public space by street artists.

The decision was controversial. A group called Association of Urban Writers testifed that the
criticized graffti had been painted by the winners of a “Free walls” contest launched by the
municipal program “No indifference to young people.” Clearly, distinct conceptions of public
space control and appropriation had collided. A few years later, on 19 August 2011, police shot
and killed a 17-year-old graffti writer. Future mayor Gustavo Petro was choked and tweeted:
“Graffti is a street art. Why did they kill him? For being free?” The death of Diego Felipe Becerra,
also known as Trípido, had a huge impact. It then became a legal and moral obligation to regulate
the practice of street art. Consequently, on 26 December 2011, the district council issued
Agreement 482, calling on the administration to draft more precise regulations. Interestingly, in
its Article 2 Agreement 482 pursued potentially contradictory objectives. A number of
misunderstandings resulted from these contentious premises.

Art 2. The agreement has a goal:

• Improve the quality of life of the District inhabitants, through the preservation of the urban
landscape
• Preserve and protect the public space
• Support the artistic and cultural urban expression of graffti and equivalent expressions.

Agreement 482 fell short of providing a list of authorized places, and it called for action in the
realm of pedagogy and training as a way to raise consciousness among potential young painters
who could be tempted to tag historic monuments or other “forbidden” places. Following this frst
step, several public agencies9 gathered during the frst months of 2012 to elaborate a regulatory
decree (Decree 075) associated with Agreement 482. Street artists were then invited to express
their views on the matter. In June 2012, a “Graffti district assembly” (Mesa distrital de graffti,
from now on the Mesa) was created gathering representatives of different bureaucratic agencies
and artists.

Who were the artists concerned and were they ready to negotiate with the authorities? How
organized was their movement and could it take on political responsibility? How politicized were
and are these artists?

The next section turns to the current artistic scene and looks at the community of artists and their
behavior as urban citizens.

The Present Street Art Scene: Community and Urban Citizenship

In Bogotá (with eight million inhabitants), as in any large city in the world, the graffti movement
has never been homogeneous. With an estimated 5000 (some even mention 8000) street artists, it
is hard to imagine how a community could be built on solid ground. According to Petro’s Secretary
of culture Clarisa Ruiz10 and other interviewees, however, a vibrant community does exist, with
its hierarchy and leadership. This phenomenon is not admitted by the artists themselves, who claim
that any kind of representativeness runs counter to their ideology and way of living.

Many initiatives have been taken over the years that establish links between different artists or
crews. In 2010, for instance, a group of artists formed “Bogotá’s Hip-hop plenary” in order to help
prepare a hip-hop festival. This plenary would then create commissions, one of which was
dedicated to graffti. Such Bogotá-wide initiatives were promising, but they never really prospered.
The sheer size of the city was an insurmountable obstacle to building a strong community. In the
localities it is a very different story. Bogotá is a decentralized capital, with 20 autonomous
localities.

The graffti movement started growing in these areas before the Petro administration considered
creating the Mesa. Three localities were particularly active: Ciudad Bolivar, Fontibón and
Engativá. Ciudad Bolivar, in the far south of Bogotá, is composed of three hills and a lower fat
area. Its population of over 650,000 is much poorer than the city’s average. An entry zone for
displaced persons coming from Colombia’s confict-affected zones, it is plagued by major social
issues. Ciudad Bolivar’s strong feeling of deprivation and neglect has inspired many grassroots
initiatives of collaborative governance. In this particular context, the locality soon developed a
specifc identity of socially conscious graffti. A mesa was organized to discuss different projects
such as a hip-hop festival.

Their members were proud to offer an open-sky museum to poor communities and to teach young
kids the art of painting walls. The community grew stronger over the years thanks to the Facebook
page “Ciudad Bolivar Graffti-Mural,” “liked” by 1900 followers.11 The page is home to many
discussions over the fate of the community. It is also used to convey the meetings of the local
mesa, to relay calls for proposals when a wall is to be legally offered for an intervention, or to
make announcements regarding festivals in Colombia. Fontibón is located in the western part of
Bogotá. Home to 315,000 inhabitants, it grew as a middle-class locality, with a dynamic and
attractive economy. Bogotá’s international airport and bus terminal are both situated in Fontibón,
which stimulates the local economy and creates jobs. It is also an industrial center with traditional
activities such as bottling. Yet, Fontibón is not exempt from pockets of poverty, inequality and
urban violence, like the rest of Colombia.

Regarding street art, change came from an emerging leader. Stephanie Mora, aka Lady Cristal
(born 1986), holds a degree in social studies from Distrital University. She took many initiatives
over the years to promote hip-hop and graffti in the area. As early as 2003, she organized a festival
called “Five for the neighborhood” (Cinco para el barrio), aimed at reinforcing the community of
young hip-hop artists. Since then, she has organized many events and when the Mesa was created,
she became one of its most active participants. Irritated by male domination in graffti, she took the
initiative to create a mesa for female artists.

During an interview in 2016,12 she was proud to relate how strong the group of women artists had
grown and how much less aggressive their art was compared to the male practice. Undoubtedly,
female street artists have built a strong community in Bogotá that radiates beyond the gender
divide. Engativá, also located in western Bogotá, is a densely populated locality with 870,000
inhabitants. Like Fontibón, this is a middle-class locality, with commercial and industrial activities
and many social issues such as violence and poverty. For all graffti writers in Bogotá, Engativá is
a strategic place because this is where the three importers and resellers of painting are located. Just
as in Fontibón, a leader took many initiatives. Camilo Ruiz could be called a hip-hop entrepreneur,
who has learned how to negotiate with the local authorities. Many localities envy the way Engativá
has been able to host many festivals and events, oftentimes securing the support of local
authorities.

All the artists I had the chance to talk to or interview have insisted on the networks of friendship
that glued the community together, above all in the localities. They all described the way street art
was an opportunity to meet people and share with them moments of creativity and sociability. At
the same time, they conceded that it was also a very individualistic discipline, with ferce rivalry at
times. For some, two recent reactions proved the existence of a rather united community, stretching
beyond the limits of the different localities. During the frst weeks of 2016, a rumor spread that the
new mayor (Peñalosa) was going to have many murals covered up. A witness took pictures of a
wall being painted light blue (the color of Peñalosa’s political movement) on the famous 26th
Street.13 Social networks reacted immediately and massively, voicing deep concern. Some even
threatened to resist the new alleged policy.14 It soon turned out that the rumor was unfounded.

The wall painted blue was simply preparation for legal graffti to be realized by famous artist
Lesivo.15 In another episode, many artists contributed to a fund-raising initiative to help one of
them after he was wounded trying to prevent a rape. The Mesa was in large part based on these
preexisting networks. However, in a strange turn of events, it affected the community in an
unanticipated way. When the Mesa was created, a great number of artists showed interest in the
initiative.16 More than 50 of them attended the frst meeting in June 2012, including the most
famous artists, who attracted all the attention. Several participants told me during interviews that
the authorities tended to consider the notorious artists as natural leaders of the movement.
The younger or lesser-known ones from peripheral localities were too intimidated even to address
the group. As already mentioned, this small group of artists were mainly interested in the calls for
proposals. Once they discovered that they did not have to attend the meetings to send proposals
and win, they deserted the Mesa. In parallel, the artists who never won any grants became
increasingly frustrated and lost interest in the Mesa. By 2014, only a small number of artists kept
attending the meetings. The majority of them came from the distant localities to represent their
community. For all participants, the impression of being used by the authorities had a sour taste.

The draft of Decree 075 could not be amended, and there was very little they could do to convince
anyone that “responsible graffti” was ill conceived. In sum, the “promote and regulate” double-
track policy had a divisive effect on the community. This unanticipated effect was not long-lasting,
though. As Enrique Peñalosa (elected for the 2016–2019 term) got more aggressive toward street
art and cut the budget allocated to murals, the community found new motives for solidarity and
protest. As the community grew stronger, artists individually acted as urban citizens and were
concerned with the city as a commons. Yet, they played that role according to their values and
styles.

Let us meet some of these artists and take a look at their work. Marcelo Mejia, aka DjLu, one of
Colombia’s most famous street artists, started in 2006 to deploy stencils suggesting the absurdity
of war. His famous tic-tac-toe game is a good example (Fig. 3.1). Anyone can interpret the
message, because the rules of this game are simple. The stencil shows an obvious deadlock
situation. Moreover, to ensure that everyone understands, the artist redundantly added an explicit
message: “no one wins” (nadie gana).

During Álvaro Uribe’s administration (2002–2010), this message contradicted the offcial narrative
that the guerillas would be exterminated. The same artist has a whole series of stencils that are not
as explicit as the tic-tac-toe game (Fig. 3.2). Yet, they all involve some kind of violence. It can
relate to physical handicap, unfair justice, damage to the environment or consumerism. In the
Colombian context, these stencils make a lot of sense. Land mines have caused many severe
injuries, with thousands of kids losing their legs. The justice system is often accused of favoring
rich people.

The extractive industry is provoking irreversible environmental degradation. And, as in the rest of
Latin America, the commodity export boom of 2003–2008 has sparked a consumer boom. Yet,
interestingly, DjLu claims that his stencils are not context related. In an interview,17 he explained
to me that he wanted to convey a broader message, not only for the Colombians but also for the
world. Accordingly, he titled his series Señales por un mundo major (“signs for a better world”).
He made the point that he had always been concerned by all types of violence throughout the
world, and never intended just to make a statement about the Colombian confict. However,
regardless of DjLu’s intentions, the millions of Colombians who see his stencils receive a bold
message about the damaging effects of multifaceted violence in their country.

What makes DjLu’s stencils so meaningful is the technique he uses. By assembling two different
pictograms, he produces a new meaning and addresses a specifc issue (violence, inequality,
pollution, corruption, unfair justice…). The stencils are always very simple, so that they provoke
a direct impact, an instant reaction and an emotion at times that will have passersby think
differently. The simplicity also allows DjLu to get high visibility. It takes a few seconds to place
a stencil on a wall, which allows the artist to disseminate hundreds of them throughout the city in
a short period of time. Other artists use different techniques, but they are all keen to spark a public
debate, or just provoke a reaction.

At the very least, they want to suggest that anyone can have an opinion and is entitled to claim it
out loud on the walls of the city. Yet, some artists do not seem to have frm opinions, or they do
not bother voicing them. Lady Cristal criticized her fellow painters who decorated the famous 26th
Street for not caring much about a potential message. They depoliticized their art to please the
authorities that commissioned their work and ended up painting tropical plants and animals. In that
sense, she claimed that street art no longer had a subversive content. In her view, tags and graffti
were no longer transgressive and new forms of street art have to be developed, especially when
the political context is changing. In 2015, the local elections resulted in a turn to the right in the
city of Bogotá.

As previously mentioned, the new mayor Peñalosa made it clear he wanted to rid the city of most
of its mural paintings. This promise proved diffcult to fulfll, because the national political context
was changing. The peace agreement signed in 2016 triggered many expressions of support from
enthusiastic artists. Lady Cristal was happy to see that many localities were suddenly welcoming
street art, provided it backed the peace process. Peñalosa was unwilling to appear to be a peace
process opponent. He was forced into leniency by circumstances. For many artists I met, the
message and the undertaking were more important than the style. When she paints, Lady Cristal
does not care much about aesthetic judgments. Rather, she values who she is painting with, where
she is painting and if the neighbors are happy with it. Clearly, she is a community builder and an
intense and passionate defender of her art’s social role.

The artist Stinkfsh (born in 1981) embodies the same posture.He holds a degree in graphic design
from the National University and started painting on the campus walls out of dissatisfaction with
an academic environment he considered excessively constrained. With a group of four friends,
Stinkfsh took to the streets to gain freedom of expression. They created a crew called Excusado
that lasted fve years, creating stencils and graffti. Stinkfsh contends that any intervention in the
public space is a political act and he conceives his work that way. He feels free to do whatever he
wants, wherever and whenever he desires, which is a conscious act of rebellion in a society that
scrutinizes and frames human behaviors.

He also thinks of street art as a component of a broader mission: that of living in a post-capitalist
world, where there is complete freedom to work on projects that are not proft seeking. This is a
very individualistic stance, where trying to change the world matters less than transforming one’s
own life. In his quest for change, Stinkfsh is keen to meet fellow artists all around the world. He
searches for opportunities to confront different publics with his art. Over the years, he has managed
to build a network, a loose collective of like-minded artists called APC.19 Stinkfsh’s technique
relies on close-up pictures of faces that he then reproduces on walls in a stylized and colorful
version. The eyes are surrounded by psychedelic forms, which make them profoundly expressive.

At frst sight, his artworks do not seem to convey any political message. He purposefully avoids
explicit political messages that can always backfre. For instance, he claims that all the critical
messages displayed on the walls of Bogotá during the Uribe years were actually instrumental to
the president’s communication strategy. Stinkfsh prefers a deeper political involvement,
promoting change at the individual level. By the same logic, he refuses to compete with other
artists in order to win a grant and enter the world of commissioned art. The only time he did
compete, and he was proud to tell me that story in the interview, he won a prize awarded by the
Institute of Cultural Heritage in 2008.

The project, titled “Memoria canalla”20 (“Rogue memory”), consisted in collecting memories of
graffti and having the result exhibited in a museum. The fact that street art could be officially
considered as heritage was quite an achievement. More recently, however, he considers calls for
proposal as nonsense. Graffti ought to be illegal. As he puts it in an essay, “Rebel and transgressive,
graffti is a way to rise up against the common forms of understanding life, the society, the street,
but it is not a rebellion that is sold, accepted, commodifed or institutionalized, undervalued,
disguised as adolescent and juvenile, framed as a generational stage where supposedly there is a
granted right to mischief, to being irreverent, to be off limits.”21 Like other artists, though, he did
not fully resist the temptation of commodifcation. His artworks are sold at fairly good prices in
galleries. Stinkfsh is quite representative of a generation of Colombian artists who grew up in a
context of war and terror.

He despises the politicians who were unable to put an end to the confict for so long. Hence, he
does not vote and argues that painting allows him to voice his opinion much more that casting a
ballot. As a last example, let’s meet Toxicómano (Andres Montoya, born in 1980), one of Bogotá’s
most famous street artists. I first interviewed22 him on the roof of a building while he was painting
a huge mural. The location was perfect. Overseeing 10th Avenue, between 11th and 13th Streets,
right over the San Victorino TransMilenio bus stop, thousands would see it on a daily basis. The
piece represented a girl with a dog, and a message, “Somos de todo,”23 illustrating the mixed
origin of the people hopping on or off the bus. The mural was part of the municipality’s strategy
to pacify some hotspots in downtown Bogotá.

Toxicómano also painted a very large portrait of cherished Colombian writer Gabriel García
Marques in the same area. Andres started his artistic career as an illustrator of punk music record
covers when he was studying advertising and later sold T-shirts for the punk community. He also
sarcastically campaigned against commercial ads displayed on billboards, transforming the
messages, for instance “Masturbate” instead of “Mastercard,” or “Enjoy Marijuana” instead of
“Enjoy Coca-Cola.” His political consciousness had him lean toward the counterculture side. But
yet, he considered that commissioned art was an important achievement and he admitted that
Mayor Petro was doing a great job. Winning calls for proposals did not stop him from
disseminating illegal stencils carrying more or less subversive messages.

At the time of the frst interview, a “We, the ugly” series of stencils was everywhere, claiming “Los
feos somos mas bonitos” (“We, the ugly are nicer”), “Los feos temenos mas estilo” (“We, the ugly
have more style”) and “Los feos somos mucho mas” (“We, the ugly, are more numerous”). During
the frst interview, he did complain that the authorities were trying to control the content of his
artistic interventions.
In Medellin, for instance, they refused a punk head he was wanting to insert into his mural.
Interestingly, during the second interview, he disagreed that censorship was still an issue. As proof
of this, he said he had managed to have his emblematic punk head on many murals painted legally.
For that reason, he drew no line between commissioned murals and illegal stencils. For him, his
work is politicized, regardless of the support or the conditions, because it empowers the
marginalized. What really matters to Andres is to reach out to huge crowds and have an impact on
them with a signifer, or simply to put a smile on the face of a passerby.

Some of Toxicómano’s artworks are authentically fgurative. Borrowing from comic book
techniques, he tells complex stories with a gallery of characters, including his legendary punks.
They all have in common a humoristic touch, with the intention of mocking the bourgeois lady or
the frantic consumers. All these artists resemble the activists described by James Jaspers (1997):
they are creative, often with a solid sense of humor; they try to raise public awareness about some
pressing issues and reframe dominant beliefs.

However, they tend to impose or strongly suggest their ways of considering an issue of common
concern. Their artworks do not offer the viewer much margin of interpretation nor any kind of
participation, as with live performances. As such, they relate more to narrative fguration than
conceptual art and miss the democratic turn of contemporary art that precisely transferred the
production of meaning from the artist to the viewer. As mentioned in the introduction, I consider
that a key component of urban citizenship lies in the artist’s capacity to empower the viewer.

Another key element of defnition is the capacity to make public claims about issues of common
concern. With Stinkfsh standing as an exception, the others certainly meet such a requirement.
Street artists in Colombia are no different from other contemporary artists. Yepes Muñoz (2012)
argues that, contrary to appearances, very few artists in Colombia develop politicized work.
Following Rancière (2013), he defnes politicization as a way to affect the “distribution of the
sensible.” Not even the much-praised artist Doris Salcedo qualifes in his eyes as a politicized artist.
Despite her international reputation as deeply committed to delivering a message about the
Colombian civil war, for Yepes Muñoz, Salcedo transforms memory and pain into entertainment.

Her installations are a “spectacle,” defned as a “self-portrait of power” by Debord (1992). They
produce a “placebo effect whereby the frst-world viewer believes he is confronting the world’s
horrors” (p. 49). In no way is she inciting the viewer actually to act to transform the society he or
she lives in. Among the four artists Yepes Muñoz reviews, only one is considered politicized:
Ludmila Ferrari, a young artist who worked with a community in Ciudad Bolivar. Ferrari managed
to have a group of women stitching a patchwork representing their vision of the Colombian confict.
A majority of these women were displaced persons coming from the zones of the country most
affected by the civil war. A patchwork, so goes Yepes Muñoz’s argument, is a metaphor that
evokes the gathering of fragmented lives into a more or less coherent community.

Ludmila Ferrari crosses the line between artistic activities and social intervention. Her role
consisted in attending and guiding the women, granting the planned artistic activity a
transformative potential. What Yepes Muñoz calls political art corresponds to my take on artists
as urban citizens inciting the public to change its mind and eventually act. The limited
empowerment of the viewer in Colombia’s contemporary art, broadly speaking, is not the purpose
of my investigation.

I can only speculate that it is related to the political historical specifcities of this country. Colombia
did not experience a brutal military dictatorship and the artists have never had to hide the meaning
of their messages through abstract conceptual art, as was the case in Uruguay, for instance (Puchet
2014). What this presentation of emblematic artists suggests is that they were predisposed to accept
a dialogue with the authorities. They were all concerned with public goods and ready to discuss
ways of sharing public space. In the second part of this chapter, I focus on regulation by looking
first at participatory traditions in Colombia, before scrutinizing the Mesa experiment.