Graffiti As Counter-Cartography: Street Art And The Cartographic Legacy In Bogotá, Colombia (original) (raw)

Since the earliest encounters with the 'New World' Naturalists have sought to identify and classify the flora, fauna, and objects that occupy the land's biodiversity and terrain. The proclivity toward classification reflected the need to create a library of ontological and phenomenological 'truth' and understanding of the natural world, indicative of the zeigeist of the Age of Exploration. Expeditions like those led by Cortés, for example, produced casta paintings and costumbres illustrations that informed Colonial class structure, and social hierarchy (and thus inequality) in New Granada (present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador Panama and parts of Bolivia). Alongside the mapped and labeled land masses of Colombian topography, these illustrations comprised the 'maps' that served to highlight social and racial difference encountered throughout the region. Moreover, traditions of mapping identified racial and social characteristics as endemic to and extended from one's physical geography. Codified through the doctrine and tropes of Positivism, the idea that one elevated his or her social (and arguably racial) status by increasing one's elevation and distance from the jungle tropics conflated space with place, resulting in a system where the Indigenous and Afro-Colombian of the Tropics occupies the lowest social standing and the Creole and Iberian Spanish of the mountain region the highest. In contrast, the topography of street art and graffiti encountered throughout Bogotá introduce geographical, social and racial features that challenge the status quo by repossessing symbols of marginalization and reassigning them new meaning. Artists like Grupo Excusado, Bastardilla, Lesivo, Guache, and Toxicómano use public space as the contested ‘land’ through which to define their own identity by creating murals tags and images that rescript former signs of social inequity, and transform or repurpose them into thresholds through which one might find liberation. In so doing, these works reveal a new social ‘terrain’. By repurposing the signs of the language of cartography, the artist works examined in this thesis seek to reframe the conventions and historical constrictions traditionally limiting the social status and the expression of identity. Consequently, the juxtaposition of symbols that would otherwise reinforce one’s marginal or liminal status by race, gender, or geography, transform into tools and methods acting beyond the frame, where one has the right to negotiate one’s identity and social status at will. The theoretical frameworks of visual Semiotics, Space and Place provide an ideal methodology through which to analyze these works, in order to map out a new formula of categorization: a counter-cartography. As street art and artists continue to inhabit larger spaces in the public forum, and as issues of social inequity reclaim the national stage in places like Colombia, perhaps a concluding thought on the path forward toward a more egalitarian society and equal participation system is not to disavow the traditions of Cartography and its accompanying nomenclature, but to adopt a more fluid lexicon.