Grupo de Arte Callejero

What you hold in your hands is a significant contribution to the history and practice of socially-engaged art and movement culture across the Americas. For the first time in English these resources on the important work of Grupo de Arte Callejero allow us to consider their diverse range of concerns such as monuments, social memory, financial crisis, and policing with tactics and forms such as mapping, murals, graffiti, street installations--all with a high-level of self-theorization, healthy dose of self-critique, and a commitment towards impact and transformation. At a time when digital text and image memes are shaping political imagination and discourse, there is not a better occasion to reflect on the work of those image-makers who put their bodies on the line. GAC is a true inspiration for anyone thinking about how to use images and poetics in collectively transforming a deformed political culture. This book should be read in dialogue with groups from the recent past such as Bread & Puppet Theater, Medu Arts Ensemble, Ne Pas Plier, SF Print Collective, Arkzin, Yo Mango; and groups from the present such as Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, People's Paper Co-Op, and Justseeds--just to name a few. --Daniel Tucker, author and curator of Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements and director of the Socially-Engaged Art MFA/MA Programs at Moore College of Art & Design Grupo de Arte Callejero takes up every aspect of art-making as a political question: not only what they make, but how they make it, with whom, and to what end. Most importantly, their work demonstrates the very real possibilities for art to contribute to social movement praxis, and even to amplify the most radical dimensions of movements. This book should be read by anyone interested in intersections of art and politics, radical human rights activism, and contemporary grassroots politics in Latin America. --Jennifer Ponce de Leon, author of Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War While tossing trash in a public bin you spot a strategically placed graphic sticker, it warns about an ex-military torturer living nearby. On a routine trip for groceries you pass street signs listing the home addresses of local genocidists. Your commute to work is interrupted by someone handing you a counterfeit 'escrache' subway pass. Boldly stamped across the ticket is the name of an unpunished war criminal. These are just three of many intrepid interventions staged by Group de Arte Callejero (GAC), a two-decades old collective of cartoguerrillas based in Buenos Aires who are hell-bent on bringing about justice from below in a city and a nation mired in amnesia. This timely and crucial book maps the group's projects and theories about art, society, aesthetics and activism while making manifest GAC's exemplary practice of haunting those who fail to remember in a truly a radical act of constructing histories that methodically disturb the complacency of the present. --Gregory Sholette, author of Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism and Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the age of Enterprise Culture.