Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Graffiti in Recoleta

I observed this graffito, presumably by a tagger named "Rouz", at the base of the Biblioteca National:



Here's its neighbor. I don't know if this is also the work of Rouz. But the term "Love Killer" reminds me of the famous photo of William Burroughs in which he's dominated by the legend "Life Is a Killer."



This graffito (which, in case it's not clear, reads "Peronismo Militante", or, perhaps obv., "Militant Peronism") is from a wall next to a vacant lot along Azcuenaga, an area that's nowhere near as scary-looking as this nighttime photo (one of the few nocturnal iPad pix that actually worked out) makes it look. It's clearly a reference to one of the sixty million variants of Peronism, though I can't tell if it's meant to be ironic, because...



It appeared next to this other graffito, referring to Argentina's current (and weirdly hot for a head of state) president, Cristina Kirchner, who is by no means a militarist. But as I plan to explain in a future post, my understanding of the incredibly confusing jumble that is Argentine politics grows less clear with each successive attempt to understand it, so the truth is really that I have no idea what these graffiti are meant to express.