It is difficult for the acronym MSAP (Madrid Street Art Project) to sound familiar to the majority of Madrilenians. But many will surely have been struck by some of the works of urban art that it has fostered: the painted walls that surround the Tabacalera, several huge murals that give color to the party walls of buildings in the capital, dozens of smaller works in the walls, windows or shutters in neighborhoods such as Malasaña or Lavapiés…
those of MSAP they don’t paint Nor do they decide the colors that such a piece will have or the shapes that will go best in each space. But they are the ones that have made it possible for them to be part of this cultural explosion in Madrid. They do not want to search for a word for their profession, but their work is that of mediators, managers who facilitate spaces and projects so that artists can display their talent in the streets of the city.
“We try to transform the space, change the vision of people’s daily life, that they change in a positive way, not only that they are more pleasant and beautiful, but also that there are messages that make them think, reasons that remind them of others things… come on, what art is”, they tell about their projects on public space, a more democratic place with easier access for the general public, where artistic expressions are very strong.
A walk through the exhibition that these days houses in the Swinton Gallery serves to understand part of what they have done and the effect they have had on the changing aspect of Madrid. There is the torn painting of Borondo, the political piñata of Dos Jotas, the drawings of Hyuro or the dressed tree of Ampparito. In total, 13 artists have lent their works to Meetinga meeting point around art in public space that celebrates the first decade of life of MSAP.
It all started at Cervantes
The origin of MSAP can be found in Gráfika, an exhibition that the Cervantes Institute hosted in 2011 and in which it showed the work of dozens of young artists from graffiti, painting, muralism or illustration, with public space as a common denominator to show their art. It was very successful. Within the framework of its activities, the first urban safaris began to discover an effervescent art, which filtered through any available space in the city and went beyond simple signatures with a marker pen. And that served to bring together two of the group’s founders.
“We started as a hobby, we didn’t know where we were going to get to,” explains Guillermo de la Madrid, a guide on these safaris at the request of Diana Prieto, who was working at the Cervantes at the time. A year later, in 2012, they joined forces to try to channel all the strength they felt reaching that exhibition and to which few people were paying attention in the capital. “We had the feeling that we could do something on our own, because there was an interest in the subject, in what we had done with Gráfika, which was also very satisfying.”
“Seen from the outside, there was a need for someone to bring all this together,” adds Rocío Domínguez, who later joined the MSAP project. “There were groups that then worked more individually, but there were no common projects”, she emphasizes while her colleagues remember that it was a time with a lot of artistic activity in the street, very powerful, but little organized.
Shortly after starting to work together, major projects began to emerge. Like CALLE, its first urban art festival, organized together with the Lavapiés Merchants Association and which celebrates its ninth edition this May. Three weeks of artistic creation in which the neighborhood shops give spaces to fifty artists so that they can capture their works.
Two years later, in 2016, appeared Pinta Malasana, another festival with a much more explosive format: a hundred artists intervening in the neighborhood during the 12 hours of a Sunday, in windows, shutters, doors or walls donated by neighbors and merchants. The contest, devised in collaboration with this newspaper, will celebrate its seventh edition on May 29.
From criticism to recognition
How has the perception of urban art changed during these ten years? “At the beginning, our objective was to value the artistic expressions that took place in the street, with a didactic and pedagogical work on its importance”, recalls Diana. Her work, that of others and the force with which this art form has developed in recent years has changed the way it is perceived by the general public. “For a long time we have seen that urban art is highly valued among many people, it has become popular and there are fewer clichés to break”, points out Guillermo.
In the last decade, many urban artists have begun to have a relationship with the commercial world: brands want to sponsor their works to connect with part of their clients, hotels and shops decorate their walls in this style and some sell in galleries or art fairs. art. “Before it was a countercultural movement and undergroundnow it has been coming to the surface, for better and for worse”, says Diana, aware of all the contradictions that this evolution has brought.
Like urban art in Madrid, those of MSAP have also changed in their way of doing things. They maintain their urban safaris, but now they organize them at the request of interested institutions or groups, trying not to fall into the tour guide that has sprung up around its neighborhood of reference, Lavapiés, where gentrification and the appearance of hundreds of Airbnb flats brought with it many weekend routes focused on urban art.
Has urban art been tamed or has it actually assaulted cultural lands that were previously forbidden? “I think it is a mixture of both, on the one hand a certain freedom has been lost, because certain parameters or premises of institutions have to be followed, but on the other hand it is possible to create in the public space in a more elaborate way, with media… It doesn’t have to be right or wrong a priori, in the end it’s a matter of how you do things”, says Diana.
As what best explains the ten years of activity of MSAP is the result of its works, we have compiled a compilation of the most outstanding, which have transformed the spaces in which they were developed, both in the center of the city and on the outskirts :
