7 - Political Graffiti: A photo essay

Summary

Travel writers emphasize the Basque Country's rural beauty, traditions, architecture, language and liveliness. They revel in the picturesque, the quaint and the distinctive. They like to dwell on the age of buildings, the narrowness of city streets and the general contours of townscapes. Yet almost none of the more contemporary visitors among this loose group makes any reference to a ubiquitous, modern, visually very striking feature of the landscape: political graffiti.

The sole exception is Robert Elms, a young British writer. Visiting Bilbao in 1990, he found

The perpetual graffiti forms a street language of its own baffling complexity. The initials of this and that party and tendency running into the slogans of some splinter group or other. The kind of giant, full-scale murals which provide the only real colour to the streets of Belfast are also emblazoned on numerous walls here, singing the praises of some dead or imprisoned martyr to the all-consuming cause.

For him, San Sebastian was similar: ‘It too is a town covered in graffiti screaming of hunger strikes and demonstrations.’

Graffiti, like posters, command our attention. Whether witty or uninspired, visually sophisticated or crude, optically arresting or numbingly repetitious, they are very difficult to ignore. Casting our eyes as we proceed through city streets or rural landscapes, they fall unwantedly into our field of vision and clamour for sustained regard. However hard we try, we cannot avoid them. Despite these noteworthy similarities, there is of course the major difference. Posters, carrying legally tolerated messages, are stuck up in already-designated, rented-out spaces; they form an integral part of the regulated townscape and rural roadsides.