Some are outraged. To many others, however, the daub on the mural of the Kiss does not matter to them. Both of them are also photographed with the Joan Fontcuberta mural behind them. Because there is no digital testimony of any visit to Barcelona that does not have a stop in this corner of the Gòtic a few meters from the Cathedral.
Sweethearted couples, influencers wearing palm hearts, any tourist pointing to one of the 4,000 snapshots that make up El món neix en cada besada. The last selfie from Barcelona that runs around the world through social networks is that of a daub, a large unfinished tag. This is how the images of cities are shaped today, regardless of official guides. How do you think the Carmel bunker parties became so popular?
The Betevé channel advanced the hooliganism. Municipal sources later indicated that the brigade of the conservation contract for the city’s monuments is already aware. “Manual means, water and neutral soap will be used, and if another solution is needed, it will be studied as long as it does not damage the mural.” It is a tag, a daub, the most rustic signature in this world, but of a particularly large size.
So big that many believe that it is nothing more than the first lines of a graffiti that was left half finished. But when it comes to tattooing a wall with colored letters, he gets used to painting the backgrounds first, and then the outlines. This daub is not a work that was left halfway. The author did more or less what he intended. Mark a place continually photographed and posted in order to travel throughout the world. For some time now it takes more and more to deface heritage.
The sources detail that the City Council increased by one million euros the item allocated during the years 2022 and 2023 to the cleaning of graffiti on protected buildings and property of the Consistory. “Although the contract is for publicly owned buildings – sources abound – work is also being done on other privately owned buildings, such as those next to the Magarola house, on Tallers street. The impact of these cleanups is very positive throughout the street.†In 2021, throughout Barcelona, ​​115,092 graffiti were erased that occupied an area of ​​279,422.51 m2, last year we spoke of 123,742 graffiti and 300,345.30 m2, and in the first five months of this year 47,739 graffiti and 111,979 93 m2.
The writters, the old school graffiti artists, have always been reluctant to mark what they came to call stones and churches –namely, very old monuments and places–. But little by little, the search for notoriety of the new generations of aerosol fans questioned this unwritten rule. Suddenly the impact on social networks became more important than the work itself. The likes began to measure everything.
And in this way, in 2019 Moe x Bcn made one of its first graffiti on one of the facades of the Palau del Lloctinent, at the headquarters of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, in Plaça Sant Iu, also in the Gòtic quarter. Moe and his review of the bartender from The Simpsons really tried to follow in the footsteps of the parents of logo art, del Muelle and Xupet Negre first, del Pez and Konair later. What happens is that these people never used to paint stones or churches, and they were never inspired by television series.
Then the graffiti dawned in places as prominent as the churches of Santa Maria del Pi and Santa Maria del Mar. Most of them, tags with no more pretensions than staining, such as those that these days mark the side door of the del Pi, that of the square of the Milicià Desconegut. And we’re not just talking about pentaletras. One of the largest graffiti in Santa Maria del Mar denounced the homophobic attack that killed a young man in Galicia. Very soon these new trends multiplied the traditional neighborhood indignation at graffiti, even in territories historically conquered by graffiti artists, such as a large part of the neighborhoods of the Ciutat Vella district, where many people had become accustomed to living with them.
