‘Walls are where we communicate’: how murals paint Chile’s politics
In Chile, walls and public buildings are blank canvases to express dissent, frustration and hope.
Bridges across dry riverbeds in the Atacama desert are daubed with slogans demanding the equitable distribution of Chile’s water, and graffiti on rural bus stops demand the restitution of Indigenous lands from forestry companies. Every inch of the bohemian port city Valparaíso is plastered with paint and posters.
“Chile is a nation of muralists,” said Patricio Rodríguez-Plaza, an academic at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, who studies the language and art of Chile’s streets.
“Our walls are where we communicate – it’s how we use our public space.”
One renowned street artist in paintspattered jeans spent two weeks transforming a water tower at the country’s national stadium into a powerful symbol of Chile’s battle to remember its past.
“I have always had a strong social conscience,” Alejandro “Mono” González exclaims brightly. “The fight was born inside me, it just didn’t have an escape. There’s so much you can say with paint and a blank surface.”
González, 77, has painted across Latin America and Europe, and his murals adorn hotels and public buildings in China, Cuba and Vietnam.
González’s giant creations combine bright petals of colour, separated by thick black lines, and resemble stainedglass windows.
“I wouldn’t say it’s cheerful, but they’re hopeful colours, which go beyond victimhood, pain and sadness,” he said.
The stadium was one of Chile’s most notorious detention centres, where thousands were held after Gen Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’état.
At the water tower, detainees rested briefly when led between the dank changing rooms and torture chambers in the grounds of the stadium.
González talks animatedly about how colours vibrate and interact. His trademark moustache twitches and bristles as he talks about his work evoking social struggle, injustice and memory.
And his approach reflects a selfless view of the collective.
“In the streets, anonymity is important,” he says, “The individual isn’t, it’s the message that is interpreted by the viewer that I care about.”
González was born in the city of Curicó, 120 miles (193km) south of Santiago, in 1947, the son of a labourer and a rural worker. At primary school, his friends named their energetic classmate “Mono” – monkey.
The nickname has followed him his whole life.
After dark, González would go out painting with his parents, both committed members of Chile’s Communist party.
In art, he found a release for his burning social conscience.
González joined the communist youth ranks in 1965 to develop its propaganda activities, and painted his first mural at the age of 17 during socialist candidate Salvador Allende’s presidential campaign.
He was among the founders of the Brigada Ramona Parra, a street art and propaganda collective named after a murdered activist, during the heady days of the Allende campaigns.
“We’d go out every night, sometimes to paint murals, sometimes just to write ‘Allende’ on any blank surface,” he remembers.
After Allende won the presidency in 1970, a sinister black spider began to