Decorating Walls: Murals of Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires [2] has 48 barrios, and their inhabitants often identify with their neighborhoods as strongly as New Yorkers do with their boroughs of Brooklyn, Manhattan or Queens. Most tourists visit only a handful of those barrios and, though I myself live in BA part of the year, I know only a few of them in any depth. Some are simply below the radar – I’ve never been close to Villa Devoto [3], which is infamous for its namesake prison – but over the years I’ve expanded my geographical horizons and, sometimes, I’ve simply stumbled onto surprising sights.

That happened a few weeks ago when, after finishing an outstanding Asian dinner at the “closed doors” restaurant Cocina Sunae [4] in the northwestern barrio of Villa Ortúzar [5] (where to the best of my knowledge I had never set foot before), I left to catch a bus back to Palermo [6]. As I walked toward the bus stop and, under dim lights at the intersection of Roseti and 14 de Julio streets, I used my phone to photograph a startling mural that, I have since learned, depicts a Sudanese woman with what the city daily Clarín aptly calls “an enigmatic smile.” [7]

Murals, the Clarín article points out, are not unusual in Buenos Aires, though from my experience they’re more common in more self-consciously artistic barrios such as San Telmo [8]. Infamously, there, a demolition some years back destroyed a remarkable mural of the traditional Afro-Argentine Carnaval celebrations.

Personally, I detest brainless tagging that defaces public and private property, though I’ll acknowledge that, on occasion, unauthorized art of the sort that BA Graff [9] leaves on some Barrio Norte [10] walls shows some genuine talent. In the case of the Villa Ortúzar mural, I was pleased to read that the two painters, Sacha Reisien y Nicolás Germani, are twenty-something cousins who make a point of seeking permission for their work, which now numbers some 20 sites around the city.  They painted the mural at top, whose title is Expresiones 2 (Expression 2), in just two days. Some of their work is done with spray paint, but most of it with latex.

The two cousins’ website, Primo Murales [11], chronicles the
development of all their murals through before and after photographs. It also includes Google Map locations, so that visitors to the city can undertake a self-guided tour – rather than simply stumbling upon their work, as I did.

For additional photographs to illustrate this post, please visit my own Southern Cone Travel blog [12].