Thousands of colorful murals adorn the building façades of Buenos Aires, charting the city’s history of sports, politics, and activism. This graffiti, which started as a subversive protest of the nation’s military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, has become a point of national pride. Political graffiti initially took the form of spray-painting the names of corrupt military officers and missing civilians onto city walls. Now, the practice has taken on an added aesthetic objective. Even the modern Buenos Aires city government commissions works of street art for itself. The full-scale, vibrant murals all around the city double as a charming tourist attraction and a celebration of the freedom of expression now restored to the nation.
And yet, as recently as October 2024, Argentinian artist Pierina Nochetti was facing up to four years in prison for participating in the very type of political graffiti from which the city’s street art culture originated. Nochetti was charged with “aggravated damage” for spray-painting the phrase, “Dónde Está Tehuel?” (“Where is Tehuel?”) on the wall of a local amphitheater in Necochea in 2021. Three years later, after multiple postponements and a campaign of international and local pressure, her trial finally began. The verdict came within less than a month: Nochetti was acquitted of all charges. However, the absence of a conviction does not erase the question raised by the trial itself. How can a city that celebrates graffiti art as part of its political identity and heritage take such a case to court in the first place?
The slogan Nochetti chose to put on the amphitheater wall referred to Tehuel de la Torre, a 23-year-old transgender man who disappeared in March 2021. Over two years after Tehuel’s disappearance, Luis Alberto Ramos was convicted for his murder—making Tehuel Argentina’s first documented victim of trans-homicide. However, at the time of Nochetti’s act of graffitiing, Tehuel was simply another missing individual whose family lacked answers or justice. With every day that passed, he was becoming increasingly at risk of being forgotten and his case remaining unsolved. Nochetti’s slogan was attempting to fight so that would not happen.
This practice of utilizing graffiti to bring public visibility to the “invisible” has a well-established history in Buenos Aires. When Argentina was governed by a military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, ‘enforced disappearances’ were a common tool utilized by the state to suppress dissent. Figures estimate that over 14,000 individuals were taken, tortured, and murdered over the dictatorship’s seven-year period. Meanwhile, a group of 14 women gathered weekly in Buenos Aires’ central Plaza de Mayo in response to these disappearances. These women were mothers whose children had gone missing, and they hoped to counter their childrens’ invisibility with their own very public visibility. They marched silently around the Plaza, each woman identifying herself by wearing a white head scarf, which would soon become an iconic symbol of their cause around the city. Since their purpose was centered not solely on protesting a singular regime but also on ensuring the persistence of their missing relatives in the public memory, their presence long outlived the dictatorship. In 1999, they drew graffiti outlines of their children’s bodies on the Plaza ground, accompanied by their children’s names and their respective dates of disappearance. Just like Nochetti, they used graffiti to make the disappeared “reappear,” if not in reality, then at least in the public eye.
In many ways, graffiti has unique potential as a medium of political art. Unlike art in a gallery, which has a more limited chance of being admired by the public, graffiti art has the inherent assurance of visibility. Graffiti is strategically placed where it will be viewed by everyone and anyone—not just those who find the time in their day to walk into a specific gallery. As a result, its outreach is both wider and more diverse. Moreover, the potential for censorship on the part of a gallery or museum is entirely voided. There are no curatorial decisions behind graffiti art, no board of directors debating on which pieces to hang in order to best chart history without causing controversy. This is exactly what made it such a potent form of political protest during the military dictatorship in Argentina. Individual works of graffiti can be painted over or removed, but the decades-old calls for justice that remain stencilled onto buildings all around Buenos Aires stand as a testament to the art form’s stubborn persistence. Even in the depths of a period of state-sponsored censorship, graffiti was able to fight back against historical erasure and preserve dissent in the public memory.
The uncertainty surrounding graffiti’s legality undoubtedly exposes the artform to the possibility of government control. Graffiti in Buenos Aires may not typically be condemned as vandalism; however, its legality remains unclear. Street art is legal, whilst graffiti is not. The difference between the two is unsurprisingly ambiguous. The dangers of this uncertainty are epitomized by the state’s ability to charge Nochetti for her graffiti. In spite of her work’s palpable similarity to that of The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the government is free to turn a blind eye toward the illegality of the latter at the same time that it brings charges against the former. Subversive graffiti can be prosecuted while other pieces are marketed as tourist attractions that form part of a city’s charm.
Nonetheless, solace can be found in the fact that graffiti crackdowns will inevitably fail in suppressing messages deemed unsavory by the government. Nochetti’s art and message only became the subject of international attention as a result of the city’s attempt to penalize her for writing it. Graffiti is intended to be subversive, and thus works best when capitalizing off the rebelliousness of its illegality. It is an artform inseparably tied to a threat of criminal prosecution. Therefore, censorship can ironically further political graffiti’s visibility. This fact has only been heightened by the rise in digital media, with graffiti now having the potential to ‘go viral.’ Immortalisation online helps combat erasure in person; a wall can be painted over, but a photo of it is far harder to remove from circulation in online communities. A singular news headline and the accompanying photograph emancipate graffiti art from the constraints of localized visibility and open it to an expansive international audience.
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
