Murs Silenciats
In the video, the debate Murs Silenciats (Silenced Walls) on censorship and urban art, at the Farinera del Clot, built around two cases: Roc Blackblock's mural of the king emeritus, erased by the municipal cleaning crew, and UnLogic Crew's feminist mural in Ciudad Lineal, Madrid, its faces blacked out. A city councillor explains that the protocol is being revised, and an audience member criticises the absence of any women artists on the panel.
The video in text (abridged) (translated from Catalan)1 h 37 min
The moderatorToday we are focusing on censorship and urban art, which is why the session is called Murs Silenciats — Silenced Walls. We will approach it through two recent episodes of attacks on murals, one in Barcelona and one in Madrid: on the one hand, Roc Blackblock's work on the king emeritus and everything that followed; and on the other, UnLogic Crew's feminist mural in the Ciudad Lineal neighbourhood.
Two cases that have exposed the fragility of the mechanisms meant to guarantee the right to freedom of expression, in public space too. And that is why this afternoon we have a voice from the administration: ultimately, it is public authorities who must guarantee that fundamental rights are protected.
Roc BlackblockThat episode with the king emeritus mural blew up the way it did, it was heavily covered in the media and it touched on many issues: why and how that act of censorship was carried out, what protocol was followed, and then what reactions there were on social media. And not so much about institutional censorship as about people's capacity — the Streisand effect — to spread and amplify something someone wants silenced. I think what they wanted silenced was not my mural, but the underlying message.
I consider that an act of censorship, but it was one more battle in the fight we are waging for freedom of expression. What stays with me is that this goes back a long way and is not an isolated episode: sometimes, when things hit the media, they spike and then everyone forgets. And that happens both in Barcelona, with the cleaning crew, and with judges, in the cases of Pablo Hasél's tweets.
What worries me is that I started painting twenty years ago and we have gone a long way backwards. We have a civic bylaw that, read literally, is highly punitive, highly persecutory and zero-tolerance. There was none before.
The first and most worrying act of censorship is the simple fact that a resident of our city cannot go out into the street and find places to paint and use walls to express themselves. If censorship means curtailing freedom of expression, and if we put urban art or muralism on the same footing as hip hop: if Pablo Hasél has been taken to court over a song, we aren't even allowed to pick up the microphone.
Behind this lies a model of the city and a philosophical stance. I think the civic bylaw was introduced as something that demonised any intervention and that set out a model of city which, to my mind, is entirely neoliberal: turning us into users of public space, but with no capacity to shape it.
Let me draw a comparison. I have cycled around Barcelona for many years, and I assure you that twenty years ago going out on a bike in Barcelona was an extreme sport. Now conflicts arise: drivers don't like cyclists, taxi drivers complain… If, because of all those conflicts, what we did was ban bicycles, we would be going about it entirely the wrong way. Barcelona has been very brave with its bike lanes, with introducing a model of city that shifts the dominance of the car; and I think exactly the same has to happen with urban art and public space.
What I aspire to is not for them to let me off and allow me to paint a king. Being told «it is forbidden, but here is a sheet of paper, paint here» is a patch: it will get the urge out of my system, but the model of city we should be backing has to fully enable residents' free expression, whether to paint and pass the time or to give visibility to a group or a social movement.
The councillorWe cannot allow municipal workers to be the ones deciding whether a particular piece of painting or a particular mural is offensive or not, nor residents demanding that offensive messages be erased from public space. So let us set aside the concept of «offensive» and act on a new concept.
The question is which concept we adopt, because racist messages must go on being erased from public space; fascist messages too; threats against specific people too; antisemitic content too. I think the thing to do is not to invent concepts like «offensive» but to go straight to the penal code and identify the criminal offences that already exist, that are already regulated and that everyone accepts: a hate crime, in its original interpretation, where there has to be an affected community in a position of vulnerability.
And then, crucially: who takes that decision? Should the cleaning service take it? The city police? Perhaps neither. I have my doubts as to whether it should be taken at political level, because it could end up being used in a partisan way; perhaps it would be better taken by the council's legal services, from a more technical standpoint.
In any case, you should know that we are revising this protocol and that we will be leaving behind this notion of «offensive», because it has become clear it is being used to carry out political censorship; and that we are working to try to ensure that what happened with the king emeritus mural does not happen again in this city.
Is there a date for this new protocol?
The councillorNo: we are working on it.
UnLogic CrewI'm Jorge, I'm here with Héctor; we belong to the artistic collective UnLogic Crew, from Madrid. We are standing at the mural we painted in 2018 and which was vandalised on 8 March this year.
We made this project in a participatory way: local women helped us both in conceiving and in executing the mural. For three years it remained intact, until a proposal from the Vox municipal group called for it to be erased. The erasure was initially voted through in the Ciudad Lineal plenary, with the votes of the Partido Popular, Vox and Ciudadanos.
That triggered an emergency motion taken to the full city council. At that point Ciudadanos changed its position: the week before it had voted for erasure and the following Monday it voted for the mural to stay. But let's not fool ourselves: it was the whole movement of opposition that made Ciudadanos change its mind. It was neither voluntary nor spontaneous, but a wholly electoral decision.
Right now, three months on, the mural still has the faces blacked out. The mayor of Madrid went on the record many months ago promising it would be restored, and the truth is that to this day nobody has approached us. Local women are pressing the administration, but the reality is that today there is no political interest whatsoever in this mural being restored: the subject matter makes the council's current leadership uncomfortable. Making women's social contribution visible is not part of their policies.
When we have seen other murals vandalised, like Roc Blackblock's with the king, we have felt a great deal of kinship. And all this is tangible proof that popular power changes people's lives and reshapes policies that work against these movements.
An audience memberMy name is Molly, I'm from Granada. I'm somewhat disappointed with the talk, because I really missed the presence of one of the feminist women artists there are in Barcelona. There are plenty of women artists here, and what I see is a male artist, a council spokesperson and another male artist.
If there had been a woman artist, we would be talking properly about hate crime as misogyny, and about the experiences of censorship they have had themselves. Because, gentlemen, this is not about women on walls, but about women who paint walls and who face censorship.
And this is misogyny on the part of their colleagues and on the part of the institutions and organisations who make women colleagues' work invisible. What you are doing as organisations is the same thing they did when they painted the faces of the women who contributed in black. Disappointed not to have any presence of women artists, because if they were here they would surely speak about what they have actually experienced as censorship.
The moderatorThank you for your contribution. Laura Nogales, who is one of the members of UnLogic Crew, was in fact due to be with us, and in the end she could not: a shame. And in any case, to put on the table that this is another debate and another internal issue in the community that is also very much alive: the presence of women in the graffiti and urban art community, in Barcelona, in Madrid or anywhere else.
Abridged version: direct quotes are kept; repetitions, overlapping speech and passages unrelated to the project are left out.
Barcelona
19.05.2021
On the 19th of May, the Cultural Center La Farinera del Clot hosted the talk Murs Silenciats, a round table on censorship in the world of Urban Art.
The persecution and repression of freedom of expression, perpetrated through multiple forms from the different powers that participate in a society, that has been a constant throughout history. Also, paradoxically, in the context of those officially recognized as contemporary democracies. A reflection of this situation are the numerous episodes of censorship in the field of culture in Spain, some of which were discussed throughout the event.
The urban artists Roc Blackbloc, and Jorge Nuño, member of Unlogic Crew participated in the talk and explained in first person cases in which they have suffered this censorship. We had also the presence of Marc Serra, councilor of the Barcelona City Council. The debate was moderated by Marta Ballesta, a journalist involved in communication and the development of urban art projects.
The participation of the public, in person and through social networks, was essential to put this much-needed and urgent debate on the table. Murs Silenciats served to expose and share different points of view on censorship in urban art, and therefore opening a door to begin to propose what is the model of city we want, how we should act in these cases and what role institutions should adopt in relationship to urban art.
PARTICIPANTS
- Roc Blackblock will be one of the urban artists who will participate in Silenced Walls. Roc makes his creativity and graphic language available to the community to turn the walls into speakers of the shared memory of neighbors, groups, communities, and social movements. His work is the meeting point between urban art and social commitment.
- Marc Serra has been a councilor of Barcelona City Council for Citizenship and Participation Rights since 2019. He is a Catalan jurist, sociologist and politician. Born in Barcelona, and will participate in Murs Silenciats providing a more institutional vision.
- Unlogic Crew is an artistic group made up of eight multidisciplinary artists, living in Madrid and Valencia. They began in the late 1990s in the world of urban art. His works are of a social nature and seek to raise public awareness of controversial issues.
- Marta Ballesta, a journalist involved in the communication and development of urban art projects, will be the moderator of the talk and the subsequent debate on censorship and its effects.Over the years, she has investigated about the techniques, languages, visions, and wills of urban art as a tool for dialogue with the environment, social transformation and citizen empowerment.
