Of pigs in Buenos Aires

I’m staring deep into the eyes of a pig, and it is obviously repulsed by me. Before you ask, no, it’s not my girlfriend I’m taking about, thank you for asking. This is instead the creation of a very debauched mind, such as that of Dali or Picasso and it’s wearing a gas mask for god knows what reason. Perhaps he realized he’s living in a sty that stinks to high heaven? Either way, he leaps out at me from the decadent walls featuring a host of other barnyard animals and a tentacled creature that is distinctly out of his depth.

The Buenos Aires sun is doing a tap dance on my forehead and beads of sweat glisten on my forehead amid all of this, but neither my soaked shirt nor the steamy humidity get to me. I turn to Ariel (not the ravishing redhead from ‘The Little Mermaid’, I’m not seeing things…yet) and ask him the foremost question on my mind. How, in the middle of this little barrio in Palermo, has such profundity sprung to life? Whose work is this? Ariel acquiesces with a smile, an acknowledgment of both my understanding of the flawed beauty of this and his pride in the handiwork of his fellow men.

“It is not as much a work of one individual; it is the work of all of us Señor. Some of us decided to add color to our lives and we got creative with our public areas. Lisbon has its artwork on pavements, Venice has its canals, and we have our graffiti. The police never bother us as they might in the western world; they know this is a part of who we are.”

Ariel looks older than his years, and it take his ragtag appearance, complete with scruffy jeans only outdone by a scruffier mop of hair (out of which I suspect a bird will fly out at any given moment) to remind me he is but a man-child in his early 20’s. He is part of a new breed of porticos that have taken to the streets along with their art and decorated Buenos Aires in a slew of colors unseen and unheard of a little more than a decade ago. What I am looking at is a street art exhibition called Hollywood in Cambodia (what a delightful juxtaposition!) and you can see the little twinkle in his eyes as he tells me more about these permanent murals.

“During the financial meltdown of 2000, this was a means for us to express our frustration, and a lot of the artwork was political. The police didn’t care, they had riots and neighborhoods to take care of, not a few artists. Things have since looked up, and so the paintings are now happier and more creative, as are we. I think it’s all very exciting and gives the city something unique, don’t you think?”

Unique is definitely one word that springs to my mind, the other is accessible. The artwork stretches from fashionable Palermo to the more down to earth Villa Crespo and is at times a cruel parody of life itself, some painted on the walls of businesses that folded up by 2001 thanks to a combination of apathy and inability on part of the then government and a crash in export levels. These artists, Ariel included, lashed out at circumstances in the only way they knew how, and their work can now be found all over the city. The pigs themselves were a hyperbole of media frenzy when the swine flu outbreak happened last year. Whatever axe these artists choose to grind, Buenos Aires looks better than ever now and even if the city still has its ills, at least it has a facelift to begin with. Long may the Pig stare at bystanders.