Canvases of Memory: Street Art in Bogotá

By Rachel Appleton On arriving in Bogotá, Colombia, and driving on Avenida El Dorado from the airport into the city centre, you wouldn’t be the first to wonder if you were in fact in an open-air art gallery. The explosion of colour against the often-grey skies makes it difficult to avert your eyes from every piece of art, each as intricate and detailed as the next.  In 2013, the Mayor of Bogotá, Gustavo Petro (now the President of Colombia), altered the laws surrounding street art into an extremely liberal policy, and the practice boomed. There is nary a wall in Bogotá without a graffiti tag or a sharp-cutting slogan. Nowadays, street art is a defining feature of Bogotá. In fact, one of the most popular tourist attractions the city offers is a graffiti tour that takes you around the most famous murals and installations. This artistic expression occurs despite Colombia’s history of violence; a grizzly 52-year conflict between left-wing guerilla groups and right-wing paramilitary organisations left a country processing a tremendous weight of pain and tragedy. The complicity of the state as well as forcible disappearance of 100,000 people leaves many Colombians unable to get justice or closure. As the...