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Arts & Communication Urban expressions festival: The resignification

Although it is true that the city is presented as a In addition to the meanings provided by urban-mural
great piece of art where a mosaic of identities is built, art and writing, these interventions sought to revitalize
transforming and implicitly communicating to its citizens, the city; the reconstruction of an audience was also
direct recipients of the interventions carried out by urban stimulated, generating symbols and networks of meanings,
artists and writers, which allow a dialog with citizens. The based on the co-participation and the creation of cultural
city itself reflects the symbolic violence on the part of the experiences, not only of its inhabitants and passersby but
state and the hegemonic groups who try to impose their also of the artists and volunteers themselves .
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tendencies and currents, sometimes rejecting or hiding We return to the idea of Lefebvre when he explained
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these expressions. that, in the spontaneous scenes of the street, one is at
However, something that can never be hidden, in its the same time a spectacle, a spectator, and also an actor,
entirety, is everything that urban art and graffiti contribute so in the same sense, the street and its spaces are the
to the city, a public space interpreted as a place of meeting places where the city itself manifests itself, seizes places
and coexistence that contains and expresses the changes and makes appropriate use of time-space, hence the
of humans in the different dimensions in which it acts, importance of intervening in the walls that shelter the
and invariably reflect a system of values, because going city’s public space.
unnoticed is not a trend, nor is it an objective when using This space “is the stage on which the drama of
public space. It is, in turn, where all kinds of humans community life unfolds.” In short, the walls intervened by
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converge, almost always unknown to each other, but where Callegenera have somehow conquered the daily fabric and
they identify. have become part of the identity of the neighborhoods; it
The public space is the place chosen by the creators has given legality to what has been produced, which has led
to express their pictorial actions and writing, initially to its conservation, care, and recognition.
anonymous, but which quickly cease to be so due to the It is important to point out that Mexico is the only
undeniable impulse to leave a mark that is unmistakable – country to have several Meeting of Styles venues that
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an expression of identity and of the features that define a Monterrey for the first time in 2014 was the venue for this
life and a context, making the public space an instrument meeting of graffiti artists, who were in charge of intervening
of diverse creative value. in the city’s Metro stations, in a legal manner, and it is this
In this sense, contemporaneity can be visualized within meeting that allows Callegenera to undo the borders of
the versatile space of society, which is a manifestation the experienced space, understood as a place (Generators
of various social aspects. However, the nature of the Ship), to venture into a key point of the city, reaching a
interventions in the social space has been called into greater number of public and a greater permanence in
question: is it urban art, is it graffiti, or is it simple time. In Monterrey, 10 stations of the Metrorrey Collective
vandalism? It is in the face of this same stigma that some Transportation System were intervened.
interventions, especially graffiti and to a lesser extent On the other hand, in 2015, it was special, because,
urban art, have been linked to illegality and have been for the first time, all of the walls where artists intervened
isolated from contemporary art. However, in practice, were located in public spaces in the city of Monterrey.
artistic interventions in the urban space have two aspects: The production of 20 murals had the collaboration of the
legality and illegality, and the type of legitimacy it will participants of the 42 International Cervantino Festival,
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obtain will depend on the characteristics of each of them. specifically on one of the main roads of Monterrey. It
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In accordance with this vision and given the wealth that the featured the participation of well-known Neolonese urban
city provides, the Callegenera Festival decides to venture artists: Ácaro, Beo Hake, Bern, Blast, Drom, Dose, Eskat,
into the streets, that is, and it is without a doubt, the 2014 Homie, Hosier, Real 3, and Smok – eleven artists from
edition that would mark a milestone in this outcome, Monterrey who carried out an intervention with a length
although it has not been maintained systematically. of 130 m and a height of 7 m. Plastic artists Adrián Procel

The city of Monterrey warily harbors a large part and Orlando Maldonado, national urban art artists such as
of the footprint left by the 2014, 2015, 2016, 2020, and X83, Osley, and Buytronick, and even international artists
2021 festivals, making these creations coexist with such as Jade, Cy, Saile, and Stinkfish also worked.
advertisements, graffiti, and persistent urban-mural art in
the city, that is, they have been returned to their natural 3 Assistants to urban artists in interventions in public spaces,
habitat, to the public space, a place chosen by these artists chosen by calls launched by the festival itself.
and/or creators to capture their interventions, both 4 International meeting of graffiti artists whose idea arose in
pictorial and written. Germany in 1995, but the current name dates from 2002.

Volume 3 Issue 2 (2025) 4 doi: 10.36922/ac.2864