When the Spanish city of Malaga wanted to clean up its sleazy port side district, it called in the painters — big international names in the street art movement.
In streets formerly roamed by sex workers and drug dealers, the faded 19th-century buildings now bear weird and wonderful murals by street artists from the UK, US and beyond.
Far from covert acts of tagging, the works were ordered by local authorities tapping in to a once-renegade art movement that has now become respectable.
Photo: AFP/Jorge Guerrero
Along with newly pedestrianized streets, spruced-up parks and new streetlights, they have revived the Heredia district near the Guadalmedina river. It has now been dubbed “Soho,” after arty districts in New York and London.
“The idea originally came from the locals and a few businesses,” said Fernando Frances, director of the city’s Contemporary Art Center and one of the organizers.
“We thought street art would contribute to giving the cultural image that we wanted.”
Photo: AFP/Jorge Guerrero
Among the street stars recruited was US artist Shepard Fairey — known for a stylized portrait of Barack Obama, titled Hope, and the iconic Obey face logo.
A vast Fairey mural portrait of a woman with the slogan “Peace and Liberty” adorns one side of a 10-floor building at an entrance point to the district.
Opposite soars a design by UK street artist D*Face, a giant close-up face-shot of a deranged fighter pilot.
Photo: AFP/Jorge Guerrero
STREET TO THE NET
Traditionally a secretive genre ranging from graffiti to stickers, stencils and cunning visual illusions, street art boomed in the 1980s and has since gone mainstream. Some of Fairey’s works, for example, have been bought by museums.
But Frances said it was not always easy to track down the artists, many of whom still work anonymously and without authorization.
He managed to get hold of about 50 artists, however, and gave them free rein to brighten up the district’s public walls and shopfronts.
Among them was Dadi Dreucol, a 26-year-old local Spanish artist, who painted bizarre murals of black masked figures.
Dreucol has been painting since he was 12 but says the scene has taken off lately thanks to the internet.
“Before, you had to go where the paintings were” to see them, he said.
“Now you paint in the street, someone takes a photo and a second later it’s been sent and people can see it in Japan.”
Taking part in the project in his home city brought his work to the attention of a German gallery, which has granted him a three-month work placement.
WAITING FOR SHOPPERS
The street art has also improved life for some of Malaga’s other 568,000 inhabitants.
Antonio Mancera, 63, smiles proudly at the scaly chameleon design on the wall of his house by the Belgian artist Roa. He offers to show visitors around the district’s various murals.
“There was a desire to revive this neighborhood,” he said.
Locals hoped the murals would lure tourists who generally shun the Malaga waterfront in favor of beaches further along the coast.
Now the street art has landed, some are trickling by.
“It is often their children who find out there is a street art scene” and take their parents to see it, said one local artist, Javier Calleja.
Authorities have held concerts and exhibitions, encouraging shops and art galleries to set up in the district.
Pedro Marin Cots, top town-planning official in city hall, said 34 businesses have been opened or renovated in the area since the project launched in July 2013.
Among them is a bicycle shop set up by Javier Marin, a 27-year-old with a hipster beard and horn-rimmed glasses.
Eight months after opening, however, he said shoppers are not yet flocking to the district. He is hoping for an increase in business come summer.
The city has issued a call for a second round of street art contributors.
“There’s a lot still to do before this will be a Soho like in the big cities,” Marin said.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,