The following interview and translation is part of a series of pieces I am writing for The Noise, an arts and culture monthly newspaper published in Northern Arizona. Send along any comments and critiques. More on Senil can be found on his Flickr.

Che Guevara is even today a master of disguise. He turns up as a chef. An Argentinian cowboy. A halo-wearing saint. And it turns out glass Coca-Cola bottles make great molotov cocktails. Discontent ripples in warm human waves. A headdress-wearing shaman has moved from the jungles to the capital. He now rents out cellphones to people on the street. Things are changing, remixing themselves.

Welcome again to humming Colombian capital of Bogotá, a city making a serious bid to become one of the major global centers of urban art. Like any city worth its weight in concrete, Bogotá is a study in the arts of juxtaposition, contradiction and oxymoron. Standing among the clean glass and white lights of the financial district, look just a few blocks up hill and check out the adobe houses that have stood there for over a century. Their corners are rounded, the grit in their walls held together by plaster and older, less affluent stories.

Time in Colombia is not a linear system, progressing toward a bright ephemeral utopia. Time here is circular, moving in spirals, doubling back on itself. The glitter does not supersede the adobe. All time exists at once.

While taking a taxi from the airport, zooming along a thoroughfare with cement medians and no shoulders, watch for men in wooden carts pulled by burros. Freelance garbagemen. They do more to keep the city clean than most politicians, who look to make their livelihood illegal.

Some high-rises were built only to stand and scrape the sky, completely unrented and probably uncompleted. Rich kids dance inside clubs. Outside they couldn’t walk two blocks without being shook down.

Quickly scrawled graffiti reads resistir es existir. To resist is to exist. Continuing to read the walls it seems that to remix is to exist––to take on the symbols and archetypes as our own. One of the local experts in existing is Senil, whose rearranged characters inhabit the florid, numbered streets of Bogotá.

¿So who are you? ¿Why “Senil?”
I’m an artist, I like cats. Why Senil? People who know me call me that because I’m an olvidadizo, always forgetting things and unworried about time.

¿What is this place––Bogotá––to you?
My center of operations.

¿Why do you paint? ¿Why stencil?
I’m a visual artist, that’s how I communicate my ideas. I’ve always wanted to be a sculptor, and that was the connection to graffiti: I was trying to make sculpture versions of [the street artist] Tot’s work. Then I started projects with DjLu, which is how I took up stencil and jumped into the streets with a couple small templates. That was the start of this urban artist project.

¿So is it dangerous to be a graffitero in Bogotá? ¿What’s the government’s stance?
In Bogotá it is dangerous to do many things. Clearly the social situation here is really complicated, and questioning the establishment is hardly recommendable. Regardless, there are some neighborhood initiatives that support graffiti work. But they’re not sufficient, so no matter what, one turns to clandestinity to develop projects. If they catch me, there do exist laws [I could be charged with], and with the proliferation of graffiti, we turn into targets of the authorities.

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Hello world. I’m going to be participating in an interesting event tomorrow night in Tucson… it’s not exactly a public performance, but if you’re reading this website in time, consider yourself invited! Casa Libre is an amazing place, and the Salon helps keep it that way! I’m looking forward to it very much.

Dear artist,

Our next Wednesday Night Salon at Casa Libre is one week away! Join us on January 27, from 5:00 to 7:00, as poet Logan Phillips leads off the evening discussing performance as ink: how does a performer choose, in the creative moment, from the wealth of languages available to him? What if a poem is better written in video? Why does one poem come out in Spanish and another in English?

A committed spoken-word artist, collaborator, teacher, and mixer of sound from the border, Logan approaches these questions time and again through his performance practice. He has learned to trust uncertainty and embrace the realm of total possibility, where a poem might require voice, ink, paint, gesture, or dance in the context of a given moment. Logan is author of the chapbook Arroyo Ink, cofounder of multimedia performance collective Verbobala, and was cohost of the first national Mexican poetry slam in 2007. Find out more at his Web site: http://www.dirtyverbs.com/.

As always, our Wednesday Night Salon will be potluck. We have a lot to celebrate in our first Salon of the new year. 2010 marks Casa Libre’s seventh year providing creative space and inspiration for writers and artists, local and national. Hats off to Casa Libre and all the hard-working, dedicated people who have kept it going! Let’s raise a glass next Wednesday in thanks for this amazing oasis.

At long last! Video from last September’s Bat Night 2009 in Tucson, Arizona. The event, sponsored by the Rillito River Project, seeks to bring attention to the disappearing rivers of the southwestern United States. I was asked by spectacle experts Flam Chen to participate in their commission for the event, and I wrote a custom poem for the event, which I’ll be posting soon. Check the video below. The poetry starts around 2:10:

The following interview and translation is part of a series of pieces I am writing for The Noise, an arts and culture monthly newspaper published in Northern Arizona. Send along any comments and critiques. More on DjLu can be found on his MySpace and Flickr.

Grenades grow on stalks of maíz and explode into flowers. A gas pump holds a gun to its head. An umbrella blocks a rain of rifles. A man is lynched on an oil pump. A soldier mounts a machine gun turret on a mule. The guy from the Men’s Bathroom sign loses a leg to a landmine. He walks using a rifle as a cane. Welcome to Bogotá.

¿To begin, what is there to know about DjLu? Who are you?
DjLu is a visual artist from the National University of Colombia, who discovered in 2004 that gallery art is turned into a static art form by being in a private space, destined to a slow death. Then the decision to adopt the urban context as the right place for expression.

¿What is Bogotá to you?
It’s the city where I was born, the playground where many ideas are born and projects come to life.

To get into some context, ¿could you tell us a bit about the history of street art in Bogotá? I was blown away by the quality and quantity, ¿has there always been so much?
Urban art linked to politics has appeared in Bogotá since the 70’s in the form of [what we call] lyrical or poetic graffiti, and also through conceptual and social art projects like those done by Antonio Caro. Nonetheless it’s not possible to speak of a consistent and diverse urban movement until about 2000. That’s when Bogotá adopted––late but with a passion––an art form that was already in vogue in the great world capitals. Recent years have seen Bogotá flower with an infinite number of approaches to street art, from the tag and throw-up, through wild style, blocks, characters, arriving at [wheat pasted] posters, stencils, stickers and complex murals.

¿So why do you paint? ¿Why stencil?
I paint to transmit a political and social stance that puts a rock in the path of apathy. I paint to give proof, to surprise, and through that to invite better ways of inhabiting and coexisting. I also paint to exorcise my fears, to get to know myself.

The stencil is the medium best suited for my project in the urban environment, since it has been used for political and against-the-grain messages for years. It’s also good for its reproducibility, through which an artistic project can usurp advertising and reach wider reception and better effect.

You have painted all over Colombia and the world. ¿How do you see street art in your country in comparison with countries of the so-called “first world”?
From having had the chance to visit Milan, Paris, Barcelona and Buenos Aires, I can say for sure that today Bogotá has no reason to be jealous. The level of technical and conceptual skill in Bogotá is really pretty high.

¿Is it dangerous to be a graffitero in Bogotá? ¿Does the government support or repress graf? ¿What would happen if they caught you?
The legality of painting in the street isn’t very clear, so it’s up to prudence, the artist’s luck, and the attitude of the police who are on shift to determine guilt and give pardons. I’ve never had big problems, apart from a couple opportune moments where I’ve been taken into the police station, without further consequences except a small loss of time and an explanation. But I’ve known of colleagues who have been detained twenty-four hours for the same thing.

What first caught my eye about your work is the heavy dose of social content. Obviously it’s not just “art for art’s sake.” At the same time, I’m interested to know if you have a specific vision you’re looking to transmit, or if you’re just looking to create images that are as provocative as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

And then the big winds came
around midnight, the radio station
was tracking their arrival to the city.
This just in to the West Side first.

Went walking beforehand, foot after foot,
to the knee, deep snow. Deeper-than-dog snow.
Dog bounding through snow and
disappearing between bounds.
I did a fall I call the inverse snow angel.
(Video available upon request).
falling thick.

And then the big winds did come,
rearranging the powder as they saw fit.
I saw it until the windows iced over.
Then came the flashes of lighting
unheard of in a blizzard, light
bouncing between snow and low clouds,
the whole world crackling purple white.

Woke up on the couch at dawn, the sun
had come to breakfast. I was surprised
and went back to sleep. The sun
stayed anyway. Brilliant day.
Sky without a trace of adjectives.
I walked to Macy’s. The coffee provisions
had run out in our orange bunker.

Drank and thought about how
the only way to live a desert is stories.
Silko, Ortiz, first Australians, Bowden, Jews
they all know this. Voices that shape the sand
like big winds the snow. Stories
that shape the ear. But
how to explain that silence?
The space after this stanza,
the long horizon where words are born.

The stillness of staying home.
Stillness rare like snow lightning.
Stillness of cars stuck in the street.

And then the snow plow came
and it didn’t matter much, chaos
is still chaos no matter who
tries to own it. The City
plows the rich
neighborhoods
first. Of course.

Resurrected my sister’s car at sunset
with a borrowed snow shovel.
More is forecast, and what’s here
will freeze good tonight. Good
to think we can leave when we want.
But it’s that silence we’re after.

•
•
•
L

for alison
diciembre 2009

merry haunzakwanzamas & solstice,
everybody

•
•

Avie is surprised to see the sun come over without calling first.

Buen día.

Orange Bunker.

Snow turns the neighborhood back into forest.

Flag is very white, but tries to be colorful as well.

The space between things.

Always good to have arms for work.
I spent an hour moving pounds of snow
that won’t exist if the sun sticks around.
Like all work.

Taller Leñateros is a Mayan / mestizo arts collective from Chiapas, Mexico. I have one of their many fans since I first stumbled upon their workshop in San Cristóbal de las Casas in 2003 and held in my hands their book “Conjuros y Ebriedades” (cover at left). It’s an amazing thing, a collection of Mayan poems and cantos, the first of its kind in maybe 400 years. The Leñateros make their own paper from corn husks, coconut husks, old cardboard, maguey fibers, among many other materials. On this paper they print their words in Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Spanish and English. Then they sell the books over the internet to people all over the world.

This year Taller Leñateros was invited by the renown poetry festival Poesía.en.Voz.Alta to give a rare live performance in Mexico City. That was last week. I feel lucky to have been able to attend, and that I was able to make a high-quality audio recording of the performance. Under a tent in the pouring rain, it was one of the most beautiful stage performances I’ve ever seen. I’d like to share that.

Download the entire recording here. (42mb) And enjoy.

I really enjoy playing with audio. I remember back in middle school I used to use old Mac programs to warp the voices of my friends and do all kinds of adolescent trickery. That evolved over the years, and I’ve been into doing field recordings and ambient mixtapes since 2006. Then came Sonidero Verbobala and the DJ angle, adding a whole new reason to keep my ears tuned. Lately I’ve been doing audio design for video pieces.

Check this one out, it’s called Urban Intimacies by Mexican video-dance artist Nuria Fragoso Armenta. She was recently in Prague to complete a series of projects, this being the first. She directed, danced, and edited it. I did the audio design, using samples from: Juan Pablo Villa, some Glenn Weyant drones, Language Removal Service glitches and street recordings from Cuba and Mexico City. Enjoy!

I wouldn’t be nearly as interested in Facebook if it weren’t such a great tool for helping me do what I do… manage both my own shows and Verbobala’s as well. But of course just about everyone who complains about “La Face” secretly loves it. So maybe I should just keep quiet like. In the meantime, be our “fan” for the latest info, including a bunch of fotos that just came out:

Verbobala

Here’s an excellent project proposal by a friend and collaborator of mine, sound sculptor Glenn Weyant of Tucson, Arizona. Glenn is using an interesting and trustworthy website called Kickstarter to raise $3,000 for the production of a new double-disc edition of his most famous work, the Anta Project. For the Anta Project, Glenn plays the US-Mexico border wall as a instrument to make experimental drone / ambient music. Political, aesthetically interesting and cool.

Profits from the sales of the new edition will donated in their entirety to No Más Muertes / No More Deaths, a human rights organization based in Southern Arizona that has saved the lives of countless migrants over the years by leaving water in the desert. This is solid humanitarian work that hardly anyone else is doing.

I’ll leave the details to Glenn’s description, but I want to throw my support behind this thing as much as possible. And since I’m short on cash and can’t pledge more than $20, my support means spreading the word far and wide.

This is well thought-out and worth your support. Please join me in making art make change.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1106560155/deconstructing-borders-with-a-cello-bow-and-a-smil

The following article marks my return to The Noise, an arts and culture monthly newspaper published in Northern Arizona. I wrote for them in 2006 and 2007, and they recently asked me back to their pages, which I am very grateful for. Thanks Chuck and Meredith! Expect new writing on Colombia for the next three months or so, posted on the first day of every month. Send along any comments and critiques.

“Colombia’s back” proclaims the travel guide Lonely Planet in its new introduction to the country. But back from what? The violent abyss of past decades? The cocaine-flavored stereotyping by foreigners? The guerilla forces that choked the highways like cholesterol? Well, yes, that’s what they mean. But how did it happen, and what’s changed?

To answer that question, a good starting point would be Álvaro Uribe Vélez. Colombia’s strong-arm president was first elected in 2002 with the campaign slogan “mano dura y corazón grande,” promising something like compassionate conservatism but with guns. Reelected in 2006 and currently enjoying an approval rating of 70% while contemplating a constitutional referendum allowing himself a third term, Uribe has brought about change in Colombia on a scale that Obama could only dream about––not that their objectives are at all similar.

“Bogotá is safe again,” a man selling cellphones in Bogotá tells me. “And now you see luxury cars cruising the streets, stuff like that. Before, you’d never see that. So I think Uribe has done us alright, the money is flowing.” Right there, seen from the street level, are two of Uribe’s principal gifts to his country: security in the cities and foreign investment.

As if to drill the point home, a taxi driver in Cartagena tells me a few weeks later: “Look, you can say what you will about Uribe. But really, without Uribe, you wouldn’t be here talking to me.” Like Lonely Planet alluded to, visits by foreigners are way up as of late, especially among Europeans.

The increase in security has also kicked off something of a rebirth in the arts as well. An entire generation of middle-class young people in Colombia were raised behind closed doors, their parents fearful of the violence in the streets. Now in their roaring 20’s, they have taken to those same streets, bringing with them an explosion of música, new activism and graffiti (more on the street art in a future edition).

This is the boom that resounds through Colombia today. It can be heard in bands like Bomba Éstereo, Tumbacatre, Choc Quib Town, and La Makina del Karibe. It can be understood by watching a crowd of fifty sitting in a plaza listening to a young street poet, or on the faces of tens of thousands indigenous people marching toward Bogotá in search of recognition. It can be seen in the pops and locks of a lone breakdancer busking in the centro to a soundtrack of “Brass Monkey” on repeat. It can be felt as a collective exhalation.

Not that everything is aerosol and roses. Those dark associations that might jump to mind when the word Colombia comes up––blow, the FARC, Pablo Escobar––have hung in the collective psyche of people in the U.S. since Colombia was big news in the 1980’s and 90’s. They are the same living ghosts that haunt the country today.

Take coke, for example. Colombia is of course still the world’s largest producer, and it is mostly Colombian cocaine sold to party people in the U.S. that fuels the “narco-violencia” slaughterhouse spiraling out of control in Mexico––between 3,500 and 4,000 dead so far this year. (Le Monde Diplomatique México, September) The cocaine is imported to the U.S., guns exported to Mexico and dollars exported to Colombia––dollars from both the illicit drug trade and from the U.S. military aide sent to combat it.

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