Posters are put up and posters are destroyed, they degrade due to atmospheric agents, they overlap with other posters in redundant advertising campaigns. Or they treacherously alter themselves to subvert the message and, in this case, it means that a reaction has been triggered, for better or for worse. It happens in Bologna, where posters in favor of stopping the war in Palestine and with the writing FREE GAZA, created as part of a collaboration between the urban art festival CHEAP and the artist Johanna Toruño they were vandalized by unknown persons.
Born in 1989 in El Salvador and moved to the United States in 1999 to join her mother, who had already fled following the Salvadoran Civil War, Johanna Toruño began creating posters on queer and gender issues in 2016, pasting them around New York . She was born like this Unapologetic Street Series, a project that has been using the streets as a public platform for years. TED speaker and lecturer at various US universities, such as Stanford, Princeton and Columbia, Toruño wants to convey strong political and social messages for overcoming heteronormative patterns, so as to re-semantise public space in terms of collective liberation. His images and statements are often accompanied by lush flowers, celebrating queer communities, the working class
and people with a migrant background. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles with his partner and two dogs.
Invited by CHEAP in residence in Bologna, Toruño presented the posters of the series Heteronormativity is a mediocre colonial concept for which, in addition to a series of transfeminist and queer works, eight posters were displayed which read FREE GAZA, «In complete solidarity with all people throughout Palestine and to challenge the powers complicit in apartheid and genocide in progress”, explained the artist in a post on Instagram. But after a while, some anonymous person deleted the GAZA writing and attempted to cross the FREE writing: «The gesture has a violent impact and many write to CHEAP to report it, sharing the sense of aggression that the act of censorship conveys », they explain from the Bolognese festival, which decides to send the posters back to print and restore the writing.
And it doesn’t end there: on the streets, certain trials take place rapidly. And so, when the organizers of the Festival bring the new posters to the noticeboards, they eagerly notice a further intervention: someone has rewritten GAZA, in white, overlapping the black layer with which the letters had been crossed. “The decision is not to put up the new posters: this gesture of conflict and care seems the best thing the city could have hoped for”, continue from CHEAP. «On other occasions the community has taken care of the CHEAP posters – even simply by erasing writings – or by removing advertising messages stuck on them with tape… this is certainly the most striking case that has happened to us as a political meaning of re-appropriation and collective feeling of noticeboards we use.”
“One of the things I love about public art is that it deals with communities – it belongs to the people,” the artist, whom we reached for comment, told us. «I am incredibly grateful to those who understand the value of liberation messages. It doesn’t matter if a work is erased or defaced, it means something to many people and that’s why someone will take it upon themselves to restore it. It means that the work is much bigger than the artist, that there is a common effort to support the imaginaries of liberation that concern us all.”
