To become interested in the role of street art in Bogotá is to follow in the footsteps of Mickwho and his video About Street Art in Bogotá Colombia. By immersing myself in his video, I discovered a positive perception of these murals, which by themselves fight the conflict and push to rethink cultural codes. A new open-air museum, committed, colorful, and accessible to all, that is what street art really offers us.
Around Mickwho, walls covered with colors that expose, without filter, outdoors, the social reality, waking up consciences asleep. A real invitation to wake up mine and continue this journey through time and space, which would push me to look at the city with a new eye, to rethink the grey and austere urbanism and the artistic canons, to exploit the clichés. The research was difficult but I finally found the fresco of the ARBOROUS CONNECTION, part of which shows the following message: "The wisest advice, I received it from a tree"
Through this advice that directs us, the tree then appears as a sage, as the guardian of the memory of changes, the witness of the passage of time, symbolized in turn by the leaves that fly everywhere. The rest of the composition is based on three other key figures: an elderly woman who lives in the Las Brisas neighborhood: Mrs. Ana, her great-granddaughter, and a Scarlet Piranha, an emblematic bird of the Eastern Hills, one of the most important ecosystems of Bogotá, which surrounds the neighborhoods of Calvo Sur and Las Brisas, the area where the fresco is located.
On the south side of the wall, Mrs. Ana opens her hands and releases a bird, which in turn flies to the north side of the wall, where a little girl is waiting for her: Camilla, Mrs. Ana's great-granddaughter. Following her great-grandmother's gesture, the girl extends her hand to receive the bird sent from the other side of the wall. A beautiful metaphor of the transmission and perpetuation of knowledge, generation after generation.
The bird represents the specific biodiversity of the surrounding area of the Cerros orientales, but it also carries a message to convey, traveling along the wall, from leaf to leaf, the latter fluttering around it. These leaves connect it to the tree, ensuring the continuity and balance of the ecosystem it represents.
Although the tree and the other elements that make up the fresco play a prominent role; they force us to reflect and ask ourselves about the best way to take care of the environment and to value it, the extremely bright colors chosen are also very important; they serve to take the neighborhood out of its old greyish appearance and to reaffirm the will to renew it, to bring it into a new era. We can say that, by covering mainly the walls of the so-called popular areas, the authors of these frescoes try to show that.
From now on, the walls no longer separate people but invite them to meet, exchange and reflect together and that, each one, regardless of their economic condition, is a potential guardian of biodiversity, an actor aware of the consequences of human activity on nature and capable of limiting it for as long as they wish.