At first glance, probably not everyone knows who Fernando Salimbene (alias Nandon) is, but surely each of the porteños knows a little about Nandon, although without knowing it. Who has not read “I am selling my ego” in the streets of the City of Buenos Aires? His quotes are popular, as are his artistic expressions. And since art –they say– is an extension of the artist, it could therefore be said that everyone knows a little about Nandon.
“Inevitably, due to the repetition and the quantity, I have generated that my work forms part of the urban landscape, especially in the cities where I have placed the most, which are CABA and Mar del Plata,” says Nandon. “It’s not enough to be pretty”, “Does this never end?”, “The truth is priceless”, are some of the sentences that are read on the posters that the artist places with lines of his authorship, green background and letters capital letters in red.
“From an offer, to the urgency of making a claim visible, the signs were always for that: an explicit intention of wanting to say something. I managed to use a well-known support such as posters and communicate an idea through my interventions. I like it when they mix with the different signs of all kinds that are on the streets”, admits the artist.
“What I want is for people to stop to read the signs. The next step is to make them think, and with that, I already have my goal accomplished. With “I’m selling my ego” – he refers to his most popular poster – I was able to raise some questioning about the value of our ego, if it’s good or bad, and if it’s okay to get rid of it for money, even appealing to an economic crisis. , or if we should keep it with us as a tool for self-improvement.
The humor on the posters continues to be another channel to facilitate the arrival of the message”, he explains.
There are many “sells” that Salimbene proposes to reflect on, “I sell my Instagram”, for example. In exchange for? With his distinctive verb, there is something that Fernando does not sell: “My memory is not for sale.” With that phrase, painted manually, attached to the posts of the City, Nandon did his bit to stop oblivion 28 years after the AMIA attack. It is clear that his interventions have a more than profound component.
“The presence of the almost forgotten ‘handmade’, and no less important, the phrases written on them make my poster catch people’s attention”, he acknowledges. And who speaks? Fernando or Nandon? “It is the voice of my person said by a character, which is Nandon. I can’t escape being myself. It leaves me calm that what I do comes from a part deep inside of me, that I worked on and brought out in a simple way so that people can easily read and interpret it”, he relates.
“In this way, I generate empathy and coincidence with the public, because as an artist I am part of a society and one of my tasks is to analyze it; I have to capture what happens in the urban sphere, without neglecting the round trip that the use of social networks brings us ”, she adds.
The street. The space in which Nandon’s interventions take place, and that of so many other artists, is fundamental to his analysis. It is in the street, in the public space. From everyone, from no one, from whom? In the text Street politics and counter-hegemony, the researchers Margarita López Maya, Nicolás Iñigo Carrera and Pilar Calveiro, published by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (Clacso), say: “Since the very times these societies were constituted, the Questioning the authorities from the street is a recurring resource”.
Street art is impossible to avoid. This is how urban art differs from that which is, for example, in a museum: you have to go to the exhibition, the street, on the other hand, surprises. To visit the work of street artists, it is enough to live day by day, take a walk around the block. Those who are attentive will be willing to find the pieces distributed throughout the cities, and it will be like a forced surprise, inevitable, a forced spectator, for those who take them unexpectedly. Being in a busy space, the work is subject to multiple interpretations.
In their work Protest, art and public space: bodies in resistance, the doctor in Social Anthropology Andrea Lissett Pérez and the doctor in Translation and Translation Studies Andrea Montoya, both from the University of Antioquia, Colombia, point out the relevance of aesthetic languages to think art, artists and participants as agents of social action.
The works, posters, graffiti, murals, are painted in the public space, and, at that moment, the piece becomes part of the street. This type of art also agrees that the public space is the historical territory of protests and claims. The pieces of urban art are, for the most part, a denunciation. The canvas is the wall of a shop, the entrance to a square, the gate of a bakery, a traffic light pole.
wild art. “Although I am a muralist, I come from graffiti. Graffiti is illegal, it is vandal, it has its own language. It is a cry of discontent against the status quo. Murals and graffiti have similarities because both are part of the public space, they are artistic expressions, but muralism comes from a more academic school, right? From Diego Rivera. And they have a more political discourse. Much more political”, says the artist Mario Abad (alias: Causi Art).
It is true that murals were updated in the 20th century with exponents such as the Mexican Rivera, but this genre and graffiti have another issue in common, beyond their scene of action: their age. There are graffiti that were made during the time of the Roman Empire. Not to mention the cave paintings, or the great Sistine Chapel.
Between art and vandalism, graffiti artists carry out their activity at night, in hiding, disassociating themselves, at least formally, from their authorship. Graffiti finds its aesthetics in the non-aesthetic, in the rush, in its action. It is unique and unrepeatable, different from what happens with other styles, such as the poster, which can be printed and repositioned.
“Street art can be disruptive because it produces a strong and sudden interruption in people’s attention. That is why my intention is to raise awareness with a powerful speech. Mine is not decorative at all. There are many who paint vegetation, paint flowers and that’s fine, it’s perfect. I have another… Another message. I have another message”, declares Abad.
Graffiti is the most rebellious of all genres, the independent. “Graffiti is usually disruptive and, at the same time, annoying for people who don’t share its ideology. It has a simple reading. Try to go for a more ‘under’ side, with a different expression and culture. He handles other types of codes that are from his own world and tries to disassociate himself, or at least remove the imposed label of ‘street art’”, explains Nandon.
“With the posters I was able to escape from what graffiti made it impossible for me: to go directly to the message, without interruption due to the ethical question of whether it is right or wrong to paint a wall,” he adds. “Muralism attracts me, the most technical part, finding my own style, developing a powerful discourse, which is like a slap in the face. But I don’t forget the most aggressive of my origins, which is graffiti”, says Abad.
Graffiti has been used countless times in history as a form of protest. A memorable moment was the French May (1968) when young people reflected their denunciations and their transformation on the walls of France. “Forbidden to prohibit”, a classic. At that time, the posters, graffiti and murals made and were history. “I try to make a piece of art strong on a technical, aesthetic and discursive level. My work can speak for me, my embodied discourse can speak for the community, for a collective. He speaks for everyone”, affirms Causi.
Legal or illegal.
Is street art disruptive by definition? Is it illegal? “It all depends on the type of intervention that is done. We cannot call anything street art. In fact, today street art is going more on the side of the norm than against it. We can find murals that decorate our streets on a daily basis and these paintings are made with the authorization of the property owner and are even commissioned works”, answers Fernando.
“Street art is close to the people; many times when a mural is painted in an abandoned place, that is, without having permission, it can have social acceptance because they are contributing aesthetic beauty to some part of the neighborhood”, he indicates. Posters, for example, tend to be more institutionalized: they are ordered, paid for, signed, used by advertising companies or as government communications.
Part of the story.
As you can see, street art is a world apart: each genre has its rules and questions. Although, like all artistic expression, all types of urban art are children of their context of emergence. The sociologist and artist John Ruskin explained it: “Art is the expression of society.”
A clear example: the painter and muralist Alfredo Segatori made “Pandemic Panda”, the bear that drinks mate in times of covid. The mural is gigantic, painted on a ten-story building in Villa del Parque. The work unites oriental culture, with the panda, and the Argentine tradition of sharing mate, a custom that had to be suspended during the days of the pandemic.
“My intention is that my works lift the day to day, generate a moment of joy, a good energetic ‘feedback’ from the passerby. I try to always have a touch of humor, good vibes. I am interested in them standing out in the urban landscape, but also integrating them”, says Segatori.
If art is an expression of history, there is a characteristic worth noting: history moves, changes. “I am very aware that urban art is ephemeral due to different factors: corrosion, the passage of time, the sun, environmental issues, corrosion, or they can even cover it up. At some point it will disappear and that is also part of it. It is something that all muralists keep in mind”, says Causi. He knows that sooner or later, his mural depicting a boy (or is it a man?) with his mouth covered, will disappear.
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