A long time ago, I watched a music video for "Waiting on the World to Change," by John Mayer. The song itself is pretty good and the video, which deals with a bunch of people painting protest messages with cans of spray paint all over the city, fits well with the ironically mellow tone of the song.
It was the first time I had ever seen graffiti used so artistically. Maybe that's because I don't live in a big enough city where graffiti is a "crime" of vandalism too widespread to successfully eliminate. However, walking around the beautiful city of Granada this weekend and seeing all the wonderfully artistic graffiti and "mural art" was altogether inspiring and somewhat ethereal. I have never before seen so many vibrant, impromptu paintings at one time. Here are some examples:
Amazing, no? Maybe these are so present because the city of Granada is even more of a culture clash than Sevilla or most other towns in Andalucía. It was the last stronghold of the Moorish empire; as such, there is a very substantial Arabic quarter to the city, called el Albayzín (which I unfortunately did not get to visit). There's also a very strong faction of students that live there and go to school at the university there, too. And they could come from all sorts of backgrounds and heritages. All in all, as my former professor, Rafa, explained to us, the city is very cosmopolitan: a little more modern and open, both qualities which bring different, radical ideas and put them up against each other.
I've seen elaborate graffiti in Sevilla as well, but mainly not in the main part of the city. When I was walking through Granada, the atmosphere felt a little more chill than in Sevilla. Don't get me wrong, Sevilla is a very easy-going city, insofar as the overall mood is concerned. But Granada lives that attitude, at least as far as I can tell. The graffiti in Sevilla that I've seen has been mainly in outer parts of the city, actually most of the times on either random objects or buildings that you would not expect to find graffiti on, such as this:
One other example I can think of is when we were going to Itálica, we drove past a huge cylindrical building that looked like a grain silo in the middle of an industrial park. It had a caricatured drawing of a break-dancer on it, and it was so cool, not to mention very high off the ground. We were all wondering exactly how it got there.
Anyway, I don't really know what the point of this post is, other than to show a side of culture that is generally looked down upon as vile and rebellious as something that isn't necessarily either of those things. It was just very interesting to see all this free expression outside of a place like The Free Expression Tunnel at NC State.
Tomorrow, I will update you guys with a full post of our trip to Granada and what we went to see and such, but for now I'm going to leave it at that.
Hasta mañana,
Nick
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