Vandals in the Name of Love
An Argentine youth-led graffiti campaign raises AIDS awareness

Article and Photos by Rebecca Plevin
This article was printed in Abroad View magazine spring 2006

On a dark, foggy night in the deserted business center of Buenos Aires, Marina Tumbeiro grips a can of spray paint. Once her friends assure her that the coast is clear, she scrawls graffiti on a wall in large, red letters.

Bathrooms across Buenos Aires are tattooed with a stenciled message urging people to practice safe sex.

As she puts the finishing touches on her work, an older man passes by and scolds 21-year-old Marina, her sister Lucia, and her friend Dadu Camello for defacing public property. He gestures wildly and threatens to call the police. The girls escape from the man and run away down an empty side street.

Only the bright paint remains as evidence of the girls’ activity. Their hastily scribbled message reads, “por amor, usá preservativo”—“for love, use a condom.”

Marina and her friends were participating in a city-wide AIDS-prevention campaign that encourages people to paint graffiti and murals on public walls to raise awareness of AIDS and promote safe sex practices. The grass roots campaign, promoted by the independent organization Por Amor, relies solely on the support and participation of people who are concerned about the AIDS epidemic and the lack of knowledge about safe sex.

“The campaign uses art to express a social necessity,” said Silvia Armoza, one of the founders of the Por Amor organization. “It has no precedents. There are people going out to paint and graffiti on the same night, across the country.”

Although past graffiti campaigns have occurred around December 1, International AIDS Awareness Day, Armoza said that about 400 people carried out a series of efforts last July to keep the issue in people’s minds. The Buenos Aires-based group solicits volunteers to paint the graffiti and murals mainly through its web site, www.poramor.org.

That Por Amor’s campaign message is so simple and direct is impressive, given the context: In Argentina, discussions about sex are generally considered taboo. Though Buenos Aires is more secular than most Latin American cities, Argentina is 90 percent Roman Catholic. The Church’s tenets still influence social and political laws, evidenced by the fact that sexual education is not mandatory in public and private high schools and that abortions are generally illegal. This silence that enshrouds sexuality comes with a cost: about 120,000 adults - 0.7 percent of the population - were living with HIV in Argentina in 2003, according to UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS program. In each of the other countries in Latin America’s southern cone—Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay—0.3 percent of the population was HIV-positive. In Argentina, the groups most at risk of contracting the disease are young people, the poor, and women.

Critics of the campaign say that painting graffiti isn’t the most direct way to fight the spread of AIDS, nor is it the most effective way to educate young people about safe sex practices. But the Por Amor campaign still stands out from all other public education programs, Armoza explained, because the graffiti messages last, grabbing people’s attention years after they were originally created.


GRAFFITI AS ART

Artist Freddy Fernandez participated in Por Amor's November 2004 campaign by painting a mural outside of his studio, incorporating the campaign slogan with icons from Argentine pop culture.

On a dark side street, Marina and her friends finally catch their breath. Their hearts stop pounding and they break into peals of laughter. They start tagging more walls and develop an efficient system: one girl spray paints while the other two keep watch. The girls make their way down the dark streets, leaving their mark on garage doors, benches, and garbage cans.

Graffiti is used so frequently in Buenos Aires to convey agendas and social ideas that it has become part of the city’s visual landscape. You see graffiti scrawled across the public walls that run along the city’s busiest avenues, tattooed on the entrances to subway stations, and on crosswalks, trash cans, and benches. It’s handwritten in huge letters and stenciled in smaller designs, expressing Argentines’ love for their soccer teams, opinions on political and economic issues, and hatred for the U.S. and North American institutions.

Por Amor’s campaign phrase, when written out in graffiti symbols and local slang, looks like code or cryptic hieroglyphics. It reads simply: an “x,” a heart, and the word usá, followed by either a bullet-shaped drawing or the word forro, the local slang for condom. In this form, the message reaches only those who can decipher it. But when scribbled out in words, the message reaches everybody who sees it.

The campaign’s phrase, “por amor, usá preservativo,” has a dual significance in Argentine Spanish. Por amor—“for love”—refers to having sex with a partner and is also a common saying, similar to the English language exclamation, “for the love of God!” The campaign slogan encourages people to see sex as a natural part of mature relationships and urges them to practice safe sex.
Marina has taken the campaign’s slogan to heart. With her matted dreadlocks and a silver stud that pierces her cheek in the exact place of Cindy Crawford’s beauty mole, she’s quick to declare her support for free love and free sex – as long as it’s done safely. As she and her friends look for a clean wall to tag, Marina points out a graffiti message that promotes another cause she believes in: the stenciled design reads, “legalize abortion.”

For Dadu, the graffiti adventure has serious undertones; she’s been participating in AIDS activism ever since her father died of the disease. When I met her for an interview in a Buenos Aires café one day before the graffiti expedition, she wore a red coat that matched her fiery red hair and carried a black backpack decorated with a Bob Marley patch and a red AIDS ribbon. I had planned on asking her about the Por Amor campaign, but during our 45-minute meeting, I could hardly squeeze in a question. Dadu spoke breathlessly and passionately about the country’s dire need for sexual education.

She leaned across the table, her eyes blazing behind thick-rimmed glasses. “People fool around because they don’t know better. What is embarrassing about talking to your child about sex? Grab him and educate him about how to use a condom. How can a parent be uncomfortable with this? But that’s the way it is; people here don’t talk about it.”
She never even touched her coffee.

ROCK MUSICIANS AND NUDE ARTISTS
Marina and her friends weren’t the only ones participating in the graffiti campaign during that July weekend. Across the city, diverse groups set out like guerilla warriors, armed with spray cans, stencils, and a desire to make a difference.

Dressed in bright orange jumpsuits that matched the cover of their latest album, the Argentine rock group Richter spray-painted the Por Amor slogan and the band’s name on walls running along the main streets of Buenos Aires. Band member Esteban Agatiello said the group jumped at the chance to participate in the campaign. The band strives to write lyrics charged with a social agenda, and it views the graffiti campaign as another way to raise public consciousness about an important issue.

“All change in Argentina is born out of the insistence of common people,” Agatiello said. He was most impressed by the campaign’s grass roots element.

For nude artist Abril X, participating in the campaign and posing for photos was an easy decision. The slender model wore nothing but chunky black boots and red and black striped knee socks as she spray-painted the campaign phrase in the bathroom of a swanky bar in Buenos Aires’ Palermo neighborhood.

“People shouldn’t see sexuality as taboo or as something to hide,” she said. “It should be talked about naturally, because it is natural.”

MURAL
It’s now about 2 a.m. and Marina, Dadu, and Lucia are tagging the graffiti line on the cobblestone walls of an alley. Raucous voices from down the street break the girls’ quiet concentration. They panic, then quickly relax when they realize that the approaching group is just a trio of young boys.

Instead of shooing away the street children or hushing them up, Lucia beckons them over. Lucia has sagging jeans and dark hair that is shaved close to her head. She doesn’t look much older than the boys as she hands one kid a can of paint and another, a stencil. The boys then take turns tagging their initials on the wall.

When I first began interviewing the campaign organizers and participants for this story, I asked a lot of questions about the legality of the graffiti. Those involved in the campaign seemed to see the law as a moot point. Marina brushed off the question, saying that people focus too much on the issue of legality and miss the larger picture, which is the important message that the graffiti conveys.

My fixation on the legal aspects of the campaign, and participants’ dismissal of this issue, perfectly illustrates the different ways in which the two cultures use and view graffiti. In the United States, graffiti is commonly associated with gangs and urban violence; in Argentina, too, some view graffiti as an act of delinquency, but it’s also appreciated as a conduit for equality of expression. More importantly, in the U.S., graffiti is an element of alternative culture; in Argentina, graffiti is a representation of popular culture. I quickly realized that the best way to learn about the Argentine people’s opinions and emotions was, literally, to read the writing on the wall.

Argentine artist Freddy Fernandez painted a large mural during Por Amor’s November 2004 campaign. The mural, he said, was designed to represent the traditions of both his neighborhood and his country, while incorporating the campaign slogan.

“Murals should always represent the people who live in the area,” said Fernandez. “I painted the mural, but it’s for everyone. Popular art is meant to be shared with people and should depict the sensations of the people.”

The mural blends into a wall in San Telmo, the Buenos Aires neighborhood known for tango and antique stores. In bright, block letters that curl at the edges—the traditional lettering of tango artists —Fernandez wrote the phrase, “por amor, usá preservativo.” Next to it he painted a picture of Che Guevara, the famous Argentine revolutionary. He decorated the image with other icons from Argentine popular culture: the mustache of Charly Garcia, an Argentine rock star, and a tattoo of Maradona, the country’s most famous soccer player.

“The people who see this image of Che Guevara, decorated with the attributes of so many others, will not only see the image,” Fernandez said. “Because above the image, it says ‘for love, use a condom.’ It’s like a subliminal message.”
The mural looks as antique as the decrepit brick wall it’s painted on. And as with most urban art in Argentina, the mural also conveys a charged statement: it illustrates the importance of bringing issues of safe sex out of the shadows—and into the popular imagination.

A few days after the graffiti expedition, I met up with Marina at the rock music store where she works. She chatted about her new boyfriend and the reggae band she plays for. But our conversation took a more serious tone when we began talking about her work for Por Amor. It suddenly became evident to me that the most compelling part of the campaign is that it’s driven by young, concerned people like Marina, and directed toward peers. Some people, she said, “don’t see the painting for the message it’s conveying. They don’t see that the message reaches lots of people and that it could save lives.”



At the time of this writing, Rebecca Plevin was a senior Journalism major at Northwestern University. She studied in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the fall of 2004 and returned again last summer. She received a research grant to interview young Argentine women about love and sex. While there, she reported on a city-wide AIDS-prevention graffiti campaign.