dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
Graffiti in Nicaragua (1995)
«One of the most ubiquitous, bizarre, and truly popular literary addictions of Nicaraguans is also public and visual: graffiti (pintas). Every village and every town is scrawled over. Originally, the graffiti bravely declared and stimulated individual resistance to Somoza. In the film Under Fire, as is some of the murals […], one can see how crudely daubed and sprayed houses served to mobilize people, defy the enemy, stake out liberated territory. The graffitoed walls were the cry of an otherwise voiceless people, the voice of the silenced taking the walls by assault, throwing up the ramparts of revolution. "The enemy was dislodged from our walls before he was dislodged from his barracks," says Omar Cabezas, himself once a graffitist, in a monograph, called The Insurrection of the Walls, honoring the political graffiti phenomenon. At first (1965–68) the "voice of the catacombs," they were destined to become "the Sandinista stethoscope on the political heart of the people."
The aesthetic of the graffito in Nicaragua is more literary and verbal than visual (unlike the sophisticated spray-can art in the United States). The citations from Sandino and the Sandinista poets are axioms politicized, defiance maximized, war cries muralized. The same literary citations show up on banners carried in marches and are carefully inscribed on banners and elsewhere within the murals. […]
The addiction to political graffiti […] is so widespread in Nicaragua that it is impossible not to see graffiti as the precursors of mural painting proper. Sandino started as a name, became a hat, then a stenciled silhouette, finally a fully painted face and figure. The famous Stetson hat survives on the walls as a kind of logo, in the absence of an instantly recognizable formula for the face such as Che Guevara acquired after his death. FSLN was a dirty scrawled four-letter word before becoming a reality in the minds of the masses, and then a mural program. Graffiti reign supreme because there is no spray-can art, which is a popular intermediate art process between graffiti and mural painting, but which depoliticizes and aestheticizes the graffito principle. […]
That the Nigaraguan murals have never been graffitoed over, as they would have been elsewhere in the world, especially in the United States, is surely a sign of popular respect for them, whatever one's political persuasion. The immediate response to the Managua mayor's painting over of the murals was a series of denunciatory and defiant pintas over the overpaint, which the government also painted over. The Avenida Bolívar mural, originally painted on part of a wall dedicated to graffiti and slogans, thus returned to its original usage.
In the United States, the functional relationship between graffiti and murals is conflictive, or at best competitive; murals are designed to discourage and cover over graffiti, and in revenge gang graffitists sometimes turn their spray cans on the murals (if on their turf), often almost obliterating then. The Nicaraguans abstain not only from graffitoing murals but also from interfering with the slogans of enemy or rival political parties. The graffiti were welcomed, it seems, as a healthy sign of an individualistic democracy and real party pluralism rather than feared as antisocial anachism, or as a form of gang warfare and gang appropriation, as in the United States. In Los Angeles, California, the graffito is a means of individual or clan empowerment by lower-class, disempowered people; in Managua, it is a means of cross-class, national empowerment.»
(Kunzle 1995, pp. 63–64)