painting – I Dream of Billboards Burning

The «MTL» series is an ongoing project with a planned total of 25 banners of varying sizes, themes and styles.

The «MTL» banner series was initiated in Santiago de Chile as a live banner making perfomance within the Resistance in Urban Peripheries portion of the street-Art Action component of the 2016 Encuentro conference organized by NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. «Resistimos» was the first banner using a black star on a red square as a signature.

The «MTL» banners are part of an ongoing series that was disrupted in 2020 with the loss of a studio space due to the onset of the covid pandemic. The banners are made in solidarity with oppositional movements/actions that seek justice: access to education, opening borders, against corruption, land reclamation, against fascism, etc. Although the banners are my own initiatives, each banner is made available and can be borrowed by activists, protest collectives and for banner “drops”, to carry within demonstrations, to “decorate” press conferences, etc.

The series is a personal creative project to explore symbols that are omnipresent in protest culture: the raised fist, megaphone, slingshot, Molotov cocktail, etc. It is also a collaborative effort to create works of art that belong to a activist subculture, within which these banners are a modest contribution to a shared oppositional cultural heritage.