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At a red light in a taxi on the Central Nautical Highway in Mandaue, Cebu, I noticed some leaves painted on the overpass above me (Figure 1). The day prior I had interviewed a local artist who mentioned that some of his work was somewhere in Mandaue. With an inkling these paintings might be his, I searched the bridge until I saw, “AG Saño” written among the leaves. I had planned to look for these paintings, but there they suddenly were right in front of me. The surprise of it made it all the more exciting. I know who created that, I thought. I met him and we shared a conversation!
The city of Cebu felt immediately more familiar for having simply recognized this artist’s work in the “wild.” No longer was I seeing everything for the first time completely unknown and foreign, but I was seeing something I knew. I didn’t “know” this art in the sense that I had seen it before, but I recognized this artist’s style from other pieces I had seen. I knew it from a recognition of sameness; I knew I connected with this artist’s message and worldview, so seeing his work dance across the overpass meant that this overpass was endeared to me in the way that only the walls of a city can be. This experience spoke to the power of street art in claiming and personalizing public spaces.
(Figure 1)
What kind of sensory environment does climate artivist (artist-activist) street art create in Cebu City? This was the question that guided my project across the Philippines. I spent several weeks trying to understand street art as an aesthetic, emotive, and intimate part of public space that is situated within a broader perception of weather and climate. I took inspiration from scholars such as Tim Ingold who posit that “the experience of weather lies at the root of our moods and motivations; indeed it is the very temperament of our being” (2010, p 122). There is an intimacy to be found in the experience of weather. While climate and weather are often imagined as events that happen outside of us, they are equally happening on the inside – both as a product of our earthly development as a species, and in our bodily experience, conceptualization, and sense of them. Street art can be understood as an outpouring of the weather inside of us, as well as a site for the manifestation of the weather around us made public and communal. The street art murals I experienced over the course of this project were vivid, strong, emotional, soft, and affected; they brought a life to the spaces around them and thereby juxtaposed the industrial death of urban abandonment.
In trying to explore the art under the overpass on foot as opposed to from the passenger seat of a taxi, I took a scooter back to that area the following day. The driver quizzically dropped me off at the bus stop I asked for, essentially in the middle of nowhere on an industrial highway. The sidewalk where I stood wasn’t a sidewalk so much as a space next to the road guarded by a fence. Uneven bricks, poles, cables, and tree stumps meant that I continuously stepped over and between obstacles when walking. The crumbling wall to my right had pretty blue flowers and leaves painted across it. The stretch of waist-height painted concrete continued the length of two bus stops before the overpass (Figure 2 & Figure 3).
Eventually I reached the bridge. The way the artwork covered all the walls around the interchange created a lively, bursting effect to the otherwise concrete gray overpass. Leaves, flowers, other plant life, birds, a woman with long hair (Figure 4), boys fishing, sharks, dolphins, colorful manta rays, whales, turtles, fish, and more covered the entire area. “Dolphins [heart] freedom” was painted in fun bubble letters under the painting of happy dolphins on one of the main pillars. Every wall, pillar, railing, and beam, even the underside of the overpass (Figure 5), which you would need to stand directly underneath to see, was covered in bright, lively, celebratory, and bursting colors.
At one point while I was waiting to cross the road, I looked up and took a picture of the overpass above me (Figure 6). The man I was waiting with at the pedestrian crossing looked up to see what I was looking at. Beyond this, I did not notice anyone else explicitly looking at the art that covered the landscape. I spent the next hour or so circling the area, looking at each painting for long moments. It was a time-consuming activity due to the sheer number of works. At every turn, there was the excited shock of a new painting, different from the last. Although this area was not particularly conducive to foot traffic, the all-encompassing nature of these works made the place feel joyful and welcoming. Activism is often conflated with criticism and rightfully so. But this art was a form of critical activism that said “I love the world and you should too.”
Figure 6
After walking around the entire area, I found a pastry shop directly across from the bus stop where I was dropped off. I walked in, looked at the pastries, and saw a sign that said “self-serve.” I was looking for a bag when the lady behind the counter said something I couldn’t quite make out. “I’m sorry?” I said. “Spanish?” she asked. “Uhh, sí, hablo Español…” I said, confused. “Spanish bread?” she clarified “Do you want?” “Yes!” I took one for seven pesos and sat facing the counter. There were only two tables in this open-air shop. I ate the Spanish bread and drank my water, cooling off for a bit. Before I left, I walked up to the counter and asked about the painted wall across the street, wanting to know what/if they thought about it (Figure 7). “Do you know who painted that?” I asked. There was a bit of a language barrier, but she responded that she didn’t know. “Do you know how long ago?” The other woman at the counter responded by explaining that she started working here six years ago and it was already there at that time. I knew from my conversation with Saño that he painted these murals about 10 years ago. “That wall, people live behind it,” the first woman explained. “They must’ve done it,” she implied with a point of her chin. I thanked them and left. This interaction left me contemplating the variable engagement street art receives from the people who are most often around it.
Figure 7
Upon reflecting on all the street art I saw in Cebu, I asked myself: what are these re-creations, symbolic abstractions of environmental phenomena, doing for the spaces around them? If I were to define their effect, a word like “livens” suffices. “Livens” vs. “deadens.” If art, street art, livens the space, what deadens it? Saño’s art is created with the mission of giving a voice to the voiceless. The voiceless, oppressed, disadvantaged, forgotten, but also the nonhuman with whom we cannot speak directly. Street art as a quality of its definition exists in urban spaces. In these urban, concrete, paved-over, crumbling, scorched, fossil-fueled, deadened spaces, street art livens the streets in a way that does not directly juxtapose their death, but instead creates a palimpsestic life on top. These layers work through each other. They are opposed but nonetheless necessary for the other’s existence.
As I made my way through the streets of Cebu, dichotomies, contradictions, and juxtapositions were how I made sense of my surroundings. One of these was the rough vs. soft dichotomy. In answering the question, “what are the sensory environments created by climate justice street art?”, I attuned myself to the feelings of spaces. The city infrastructure was undeniably “rough”; it was sandy, uneven, loud, and unfamiliar. The hard crumbling facades and harsh sun made existing in the spaces around street art a physical challenge. The art itself, however, was “soft.” This was above all a metaphoric softening, as the art on the walls did nothing to alter the physical texture of the street. But instead, the feeling of existing in the spaces around climate justice street art was one of familiarity, focused attention, and a softness to the environment created by the deliberate introduction of color; colors in the shapes of ideas welcoming you into the urban landscape.
At the same time, the act of painting across public space is an inherently political disruption. Climate justice street art is particularly defined by a sense of struggle. Embodied in the flaking paint layers on top of crumbling concrete, climate activist messaging is a meta-representation of the worlds that activists strive for and against. It is all present in one place, the polluting infrastructure, and the imagined creation of a harmonic alternative. The struggle of materials coming together, falling apart, and coming together again in new and palimpsestic configurations can be seen across these larger-than-life murals of resistance atop deadened concrete.
Upon the end of my project in the Philippines, I returned to Vienna where I had been living for several years. The first morning after my return I woke up at 6AM due to jet lag. I ate breakfast and felt the urge to go for a morning walk like I had most mornings in Cebu. It was a Sunday morning, and the silence of Vienna’s 15th district was shocking. I had known this city was quiet, but in direct comparison to Cebu, it was almost disconcertingly so. There was practically no one else around. A man walked in the opposite direction with his dog, and I prepared to say, “morgen!” [morning] as we passed each other, just as everyone would greet each other in Cebu. But as I got closer he stopped and faced away so his shoulder was towards me. We said nothing. I enjoyed wandering without a destination or timetable, and I started to notice street art, or what some would describe as graffiti, all around. Against the white, sterile, pearlescent buildings, shiny clean streets, and smoothly paved sidewalks, I was glad to see the lively bursts of color. Artivism as “disruption” came to mind. These scribblings, bubble box letters and quick doodles, felt like a peek through the veil of Viennese order into the loud, colorful humanity that exists everywhere, but that I especially experienced in Cebu.
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