Stylogenyin the style of Chilean Estallido Social Graphics (Revuelta Popular of 2019–20)

Counterculture · 2019–2022 · Latin America & Caribbean

Chilean Estallido Social Graphics (Revuelta Popular of 2019–20)

Also known as Estallido artístico, Estallido gráfico, Arte callejero del estallido social

The street graphics of Chile's popular revolt, from 18 October 2019 to the March 2020 lockdowns, when a leaderless movement covered Santiago's Plaza de la Dignidad, the Alameda and other cities' walls. Photocopied paste-ups, stencils, linocuts, brushed murals, painted cloth banners and sprayed slogans pile into palimpsests, pasted again as soon as they are painted out. A small shared stock of signs recurs, above all the black riot dog Negro Matapacos in his red kerchief and the wounded eye, beside black-humoured attacks on power and many-coloured shrines to the dead and wounded.

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A distressed protest poster centres a woman looking upward with a raised fist, surrounded by masked demonstrators, red and blue flags, apartment buildings, red flowers and a flying bird. Large rough lettering across the top reads “OTRO MAÑANA” amid torn-looking patches of red, purple, blue, black and cream.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

Use it with care

This is the work of a living movement made under real repression: by the end of January 2020 the INDH had counted 427 people with eye injuries at the hands of the police, and some 460 eye injuries by mid-March, and protesters such as Gustavo Gatica were blinded, so do not use bleeding or patched eyes, victims' portraits or the red-kerchiefed dog as edgy styling, merchandise or a brand backdrop. Its imagined executions of named, living politicians (hanged effigies and photomontages), its posters calling for police to be set on fire ('LOS PACOS SON INFLAMABLES', 'FUEGO A LA YUTA') and slogans such as 'matapacos' ('cop-killer') and 'ACAB' are documents of rage, not tropes to reuse; the Wenufoye belongs to the Mapuche people and stands for their own political cause, so do not use it as decoration. Most makers were anonymous and the revolt is still contested in Chile, where in 2022 a UDI deputy said he would summon the culture minister over an exhibition of its art; do not attribute unsigned works to named people, and never present a generated image as a work of the revolt.

01

How it works

  • Paste rather than commission: run the poster off a photocopier, a home printer or the silkscreen of a design-student workshop or a feminist brigade, tile a big portrait from letter-size sheets, wheat-paste it over yesterday's layer and paste again when the city paints it out, until a facade such as the GAM's becomes a palimpsest with no focal point. Where a wall or shutter is left standing, brush a mural on it in the same few colours: the black dog leaping over a crowd of hooded stick figures, or pale, bloodied bodies beside a soldier.
  • Letter the slogan by hand in the street's own voice: brushed or sprayed capitals on shutters and hoardings, marker on cardboard and bedsheets, white paint on red cloth, short and sarcastic ('Piñera tambien EVADE!', 'LA POESÍA ESTÁ EN LA KLLE', 'NO + ABUSOS' in the 'No +' form of the art collective CADA), and the feminist charge 'ESTADO VIOLADOR', the state as rapist that LasTesis's 'Un violador en tu camino' set to a chant from 20 November 2019; cut a stencil when a line or a figure has to be repeated across the city.
  • Work from a small shared stock of signs that anyone can redraw instead of a logo: the black street dog Negro Matapacos in his red kerchief, the bleeding or patched eye of the protesters shot with pellets, the faces of Víctor Jara, Gabriela Mistral and Camilo Catrillanca, the Chilean flag inverted or blacked out, flown beside the Mapuche Wenufoye.
  • Hijack what everyone already knows: a Santiago Metro station sign ('Estación Baquedano – Combinación a 1973'), Delacroix's Liberty holding a cooking pot and a black flag, a punk band's record logo, a Virgin in a gas mask, the Joker or Pikachu, a meme's labelled diagram, keeping enough of the original for the joke to land.
  • Aim black humour at named holders of power rather than at the crowd: scrawl over the president's official portrait, stencil him as the Joker, split his face with Pinochet's in dark glasses and braided cap, write 'FASCISTA' under a minister's portrait; keep candles, portraits and names for the protesters' own dead and wounded.
  • Print the paste-ups mostly black on white paper or kraft, with one red for blood and the dog's kerchief, and let spray, torn paper and the colour beneath supply the rest; let the memorial walls, such as the GAM front, turn many-coloured with ribbons, crocheted flowers, framed Virgins, name cards, the Wenufoye and the purple of the feminist pañuelo.

Santiago, above all Plaza Baquedano (renamed 'Plaza de la Dignidad' by protesters), the front of the GAM cultural centre and the Alameda, and the walls of Valparaíso, Viña del Mar, La Serena, Valdivia and other Chilean cities. Secondary students' mass fare evasions in the Santiago Metro began on 7 October 2019 and turned into a nationwide revolt on 18 October; Valderrama Gómez dates the revolt, and its 'estallido gráfico', from then to the start of the pandemic emergency in early March 2020. Artists left their studios for the street, design students and a feminist art-and-propaganda brigade printed posters, and people with no art or design training joined them; in a leaderless movement most work was made and received anonymously. The authorities erased most of the graffiti and street art in central Santiago during the pandemic. It survives in photographs and archives (the Museo del Estallido Social, opened in November 2020; La Ciudad como Texto by Carola Ureta and Daniel Corvillón; Colectivo Populárica's Lo que Puede un Pueblo; Instagram accounts such as @las.paredes.gritan; poster collections at Cornell and Stanford), and lived on in exhibitions, anniversary actions and the 'Apruebo' of the plebiscite of 25 October 2020 until the draft constitution was rejected in September 2022

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Generous white space, Modular grid, Gradients, Gloss & highlights, Chrome & 3D render, Authoritative & institutional, Luxurious & glamorous, Calm & contemplative

Palette

  • #111111
  • #d0202e
  • #f1eee6
  • #c8a46e
  • #5b2a86
  • #1f4fa0

Typefaces

  • Brushed and spray-painted capitals of the rayados on walls, shutters and hoardings ('ESTADO VIOLADOR / Vamos a cobrar' in heavy black brush letters on red), with the street's spellings such as 'KLLE' for calle and 'kiltro' for quiltro

  • Marker hand-lettering on cardboard placards and bedsheet banners, in capitals or plain handwriting, sometimes each letter in a different colour ('CHILE DESPERTÓ')

  • Stencil lettering cut together with the image

    'RESISTE COMO KILTRO' under the dog, 'PRIMERA LINEA' round a dog's head in a roundel, 'FASCISTA' under a portrait of Chadwick

  • White painted capitals on red cloth lienzos

    'LA POESÍA ESTÁ EN LA KLLE', Biblioteca Nacional

  • Santiago Metro signage, its station bar and line number kept intact in parodies

    'Estación Baquedano – Combinación a 1973'

  • Heavy hand-drawn capitals set into linocut-look paste-ups and hatched round with the picture, flames rising from the Os

    'NOS CANSAMOS / NOS UNIMOS'

  • Comic lettering in speech balloons (the Talleres Estudiantiles 'Apuntes de Clase' posters) and plain computer type labelling meme-style diagrams ('¡CHILE PELEA JUSTO!')

Known for

  • Negro Matapacos (d. 26 August 2017)

    the black Santiago street dog with a red kerchief who joined the 2011 student marches, revived in 2019 on posters, stickers, murals, papier-mâché sculptures carried at Plaza Baquedano and comics (reported by Las Últimas Noticias on 12 November 2019 as 'Pareman y Matapacos: el estallido social llega al cómic en tiempo récord'); a giant sculpture by Marcel Solá in the Plaza a la Aviación, Providencia (15 November 2019); stickers of him jumping a turnstile in New York subway stations during the fare evasion of 1 November 2019; and a statue set on the empty plinth of the Baquedano monument on 18 October 2021

  • 'Renuncia Piñera' flag on the General Baquedano monument at Plaza de la Dignidad, redrawing the logo of the punk band Fiskales Ad Hok

    (the face of Pedro de Valdivia pierced by a pike, on their first LP of 1993) with Sebastián Piñera's face, after Tomás Ives's projections of right-wing figures in the logo at Lollapalooza Chile in March 2019 (Archivo Lo que Puede un Pueblo)

  • Ofensiva Gráfica's photomontage of the interior minister Andrés Chadwick hanged, pasted in many parts of Santiago in late 2019, and a hanged effigy of Piñera with his printed face on a footbridge in Talagante in early 2020, signed only with a banner reading 'Apruebo' and 'ACAB'

  • The front of the Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral

    (GAM) beside Plaza de la Dignidad, its perforated metal wall layered with paste-ups (a portrait tiled from sixteen sheets, half Piñera with black tears and half Pinochet in dark glasses and braided cap, December 2019; Fab Ciraolo's larger-than-life Gabriela Mistral in jeans holding a black flag, later rescued with its piece of wall) and by January 2020 a votive wall of ribbons, crocheted flowers, framed Virgins, name cards, a Wenufoye, a purple feminist pañuelo and a board with a tree drawn in close handwriting under red handprints; the subject of a collective mural for the Museo del Estallido Social, which Marcel Solá opened near the plaza in November 2020 with reproductions of erased murals by 70 artists

  • Placard in the style of a Santiago Metro sign

    'ESTACIÓN BAQUEDANO / 1 Combinación a 1973 / Transfer to 1973', splashed with red, carried on 25 October 2019; and a mural at the Liceo Técnico Marta Brunet in La Serena recasting Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People with a cooking pot for the cacerolazos and a black Chilean flag (November 2019)

  • Red cloth banner 'LA POESÍA ESTÁ EN LA KLLE' in white capitals, hung on the Biblioteca Nacional in Santiago

    (November 2019); a bedsheet banner 'CHILE DESPERTÓ' in multicoloured marker letters hung on a building's railing (25 October 2019); and in La Serena a bus shelter netted in black crochet by the textile group Las CuentaPuntos, with a crocheted frying pan and wooden spoon and 'Somos parte del Tejido Social' stitched on cloth strips (January 2020)

  • Brushed murals on walls and shutters left standing

    on Vicuña Mackenna (photographed 1 February 2020) a black Matapacos in his red kerchief leaps over a fire above hooded stick-figure protesters carrying flags with a weeping eye and 'ACAB', under a banner reading 'APRUEBO – CONVENCIÓN C'; on the Alameda at Portugal (January 2020) pale, bloodied figures with raised hands, one hung upside down, beside a soldier in green, painted on a black shutter under the sprayed 'VIVA LA REVUELTA'

  • Estallido Artístico

    Testimonios creativos de la agitación social, Nómada Espacio Artístico, Santiago, opened 16 January 2020: work by 22 artists, illustrators, photographers and collectives, among it stencil, paste-up, linocut and digital illustration, and Paloma Rodríguez's paste-ups of prints of her paintings in Santiago, Valparaíso and Rio de Janeiro

03

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Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Chilean Estallido Social Graphics (Revuelta Popular of 2019–20)’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleChilean Estallido Social Graphics (Revuelta Popular of 2019–20)2019–2022 · Latin America & Caribbean

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Sources

  1. Silvio Valderrama Gómez, 'Matar a la muerte. Trasfondos de la estética de la violencia en la revuelta popular chilena de 2019', Desbordes 13 (2), issue of 2022 published 6 July 2023, pp. 105–127, DOI 10.22490/25394150.6970 (https://hemeroteca.unad.edu.co/index.php/desbordes/article/view/6970: the 'estallido gráfico' from 18 October 2019 to early March 2020; political graphics with antecedents in Latin American muralism and 1960s poster art, now joined by punk, the fanzine tradition and internet dynamics; artists using digital and analogue technologies and people with no art or design training; the archives Museo del Estallido Social, La Ciudad como Texto by Carola Ureta and Daniel Corvillón (day 36 of the revolt, south side of the Alameda), @las.paredes.gritan and Colectivo Populárica's Lo que Puede un Pueblo; the leaderless movement and its iconoclasm; Fiskales Ad Hok's logo, Tomás Ives's Lollapalooza images and his words on 'el humor negro, la ironía y el sarcasmo'; the 'Renuncia Piñera' flag on the Baquedano monument; DIY flags and lienzos; Ofensiva Gráfica's image of Chadwick and the 'fotomontaje de Andrés Chadwick colgado'; the Piñera effigy in Talagante with a banner reading 'Apruebo' and 'ACAB'; more than 400 cases of ocular trauma by March 2021 per the Amnesty-based figures; the Perro Matapacos among the revolt's heroes)
  2. Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov, The Walls of Santiago: Social Revolution and Political Aesthetics in Contemporary Chile, Protest, Culture & Society 30 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2022), publisher's page with contents (https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/Gordon-ZolovWalls: chapters 'It's Not 30 Pesos, It's 30 Years', 'The Right to Live in Peace', 'Evade', 'The Revolution Will Be Feminist or Will Not Be!', 'Wallmapu Libre!', 'Chile Woke Up', 'Poetry Is in the Street', 'It's a Match!', 'Behind the Scenes'; 'the murals, graffiti, and other political graphics' photographed in Santiago between October 2019 and the March 2020 lockdown)
  3. Camila Sanhueza, review of The Walls of Santiago, A Contracorriente 21 (1), Fall 2023, pp. 300–304 (https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/download/2389/3718/10656: 'estallido artístico'; murals, paintings, posters, screenprints, graffiti and tags; chapter 2 on representations of Víctor Jara and 'El derecho de vivir en paz'; humour against a punk or anarchic aesthetic; chapter 4 on feminism as a founding base of the revolt and chapter 5 on the Mapuche cause; the iconography of the eye, mutilated and bleeding eyes; avant-garde sensibility made collectively and anonymously; pop-art figures such as the Joker, Pikachu and Felipe Camiroaga; artivist tradition since the Unidad Popular; works erased by the national and local governments when the pandemic quarantines began)
  4. Nómada Espacio Artístico, Estallido Artístico: Testimonios creativos de la agitación social, exhibition catalogue, Santiago, 16 January 2020 (https://museodelestallidosocial.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/catalogo_nomada_exposicion_estallido_artistico_2020.pdf, read with pdftotext: works by twenty-two artists; artists leaving their studios for the street; paste-up as one of the most effective techniques, pasted again the day after it was covered; no technical expertise needed to letter walls; stencil, paste-up, linocut and digital illustration entries; Paloma Rodríguez's paste-ups of prints of her paintings in Santiago, Valparaíso and Rio de Janeiro)
  5. Museo del Estallido Social, 'Collective mural for the Chilean people's dignity' (https://museodelestallidosocial.org/collective-mural-for-the-chilean-peoples-dignity/: rescuing the protest practices around Plaza Dignidad and the GAM facade, 'where different layers of artistic and political interventions' accumulated, and systematically erased by regional authorities)
  6. AFP, 'Museo muestra arte callejero del estallido social de Chile', Diario Las Américas, 12 November 2020 (https://www.diariolasamericas.com/cultura/museo-muestra-arte-callejero-del-estallido-social-chile-n4210384: the museum opened in early November 2020 a few blocks from Plaza Italia; Marcel Solá gathered 70 artists to recreate murals; a giant replica of Negro Matapacos, Primera Línea shields; most original street art already erased)
  7. Wikipedia (es), 'Negro Matapacos' (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro_Matapacos: black coat and red kerchief; the 2011 student protests; death on 26 August 2017; posters, stickers, murals, papier-mâché sculptures and comics in 2019, citing Las Últimas Noticias, 12 November 2019; Marcel Solá's giant sculpture in the Plaza a la Aviación, 15 November 2019; the New York subway stickers of 1 November 2019; the statue on the empty Baquedano plinth, 18 October 2021) and Wikipedia (en), 'Negro Matapacos' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro_Matapacos)
  8. Wikipedia (es), 'Estallido social', section 'Simbología' (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estallido_social: the Chilean flag inverted or coloured black and the Mapuche Wenufoye; Susana Hidalgo's photograph on the Baquedano monument; Negro Matapacos; the Joker and Pikachu; the 'Avengers chilenos' such as Pareman; 'Chile despertó' and 'Hasta que la dignidad se haga costumbre'; Gustavo Gatica blinded by pellets)
  9. Wikipedia (en), '2019–2022 Chilean protests' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932022_Chilean_protests: fare evasion from 7 October 2019; the INDH's report at the end of January 2020 of 427 people with eye injuries at the hands of the police, after an earlier count of 964 injured by pellets, 222 with eye problems; 'bandaged eyes' as a protest symbol; government agencies erased most graffiti and street art in downtown Santiago; plebiscite of 25 October 2020)
  10. Wikipedia (es), 'Plaza Baquedano' (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Baquedano: called 'Plaza de la Dignidad' by protesters from October 2019; damage to the monument and the decision of the Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales in March 2021 to remove the Baquedano statue for restoration)
  11. 'Diputado UDI citará a ministra de las Culturas por exposición sobre el estallido social en Viña del Mar', El Dínamo, 16 June 2022 (https://www.eldinamo.cl/pais/2022/06/16/diputado-udi-citara-a-ministra-de-las-culturas-por-exposicion-sobre-el-estallido-social-en-vina-del-mar/: the UDI deputy Gustavo Benavente announced he would summon ('citará') the culture minister Julieta Brodsky over Memoria Gráfica Chile MMXIX, work by 31 artists first shown at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in October 2021, then in Quintero and at the Museo Palacio Vergara)
  12. Daniela Salinas, 'Arte y dignidad en la era digital', MGC / Revista de Gestión Cultural 14 (2019) (https://revistasdex.uchile.cl/index.php/mgc/article/view/13315: the Instagram archive 'Museo de la Dignidad'; photography, printmaking and printing, mostly collage or digital print, pasted on walls; Camilo Catrillanca, Gabriela Mistral, the Matapacos dog and religious images on the walls; a street 'Guernica' in Barrio Lastarria)
  13. Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, 'Chilean protest posters', collection 8836 (https://archive-prod.library.cornell.edu/subjects/54540: 102 posters from October 2019 in screen printing, woodcut, hand drawing and digital print; creators include Estudiantes Diseño Universidad Católica de Chile and the Brigada de Arte y Propaganda Coordinadora Feminista 8M)
  14. Stanford University Libraries, 'Chilean protest collection: posters, zines and ephemera', M2659 (https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8fx7j95/: 108 posters and 25 zines and ephemera, 2019, by independent artists and publishers in very small runs)
  15. Wikimedia Commons, Category:Street art in the Estallido social and Category:Signage at the Estallido social (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Street_art_in_the_Estallido_social), photographs used to check the visual description: 'Arbol en el GAM' (25 January 2020, the GAM front with ribbons, crocheted flowers, framed Virgins, name cards, a Wenufoye, a purple feminist pañuelo and a board with a handwritten tree under red handprints), 'Grafiti del estallido 33' (27 December 2019, a portrait pasted as a grid of sixteen photocopied sheets on the GAM's perforated wall, half Piñera with black tears, half Augusto Pinochet in dark glasses and a braided peaked cap), 'Cartel del perro quiltro' ('RESISTE COMO KILTRO'), 'Arte callejero stgo 09' ('PRIMERA LÍNEA' stencil roundel), 'Estado violador' (20 November 2019, heavy black brush capitals on a red shutter), 'Imagen contra Ministro Chadwick' (La Serena, 20 November 2019), 'Fotografía oficial vandalizada de Sebastián Piñera' (Viña del Mar), 'Piñera Joker 2019-11-12' (a stencil of Piñera as the Joker outside the Universidad Católica), 'Virgen de la baricada' (14 December 2019, a Virgin in a gas mask with burning tyres on her mantle, framed in barbed wire), 'La Revolución a la Chilena' (La Serena), 'La poesía está en la calle', 'Protestas en Chile 20191025 04' and '20191025 47', 'Matapacos en papel maché', 'Intervención textil paradero de La Serena' (3 January 2020, Las CuentaPuntos), 'Mural en Vicuña Mackenna' (1 February 2020), 'Mural en Alameda esquina Portugal' (25 January 2020), and the 'Afiches de manifestaciones en Santiago' series (22 October 2019: the 'Apuntes de Clase' posters under 'Piñera tambien EVADE!', '¡CHILE PELEA JUSTO!', 'NOS CANSAMOS / NOS UNIMOS', 'LOS PACOS SON INFLAMABLES' tiled from four sheets and 'FUEGO A LA YUTA'; 26 October 2019: the woodcut-look hooded figure; 30 October 2019: paste-ups on kraft and cream paper over a billboard)
  16. Terri Gordon-Zolov, 'Chile's Estallido Social and the Art of Protest', Sociologica 17 (1), 2023, pp. 41–55, DOI 10.6092/issn.1971-8853/16817 (https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/download/16817/16616, read with pdftotext: the estallido artístico; Gabriela Mistral and Víctor Jara as guiding spirits, Jara's face stencilled on walls, posters and t-shirts; Fab Ciraolo's larger-than-life paste-up of Mistral in jeans with a black flag on the GAM, the 'epicenter of protest iconography', rescued with its piece of wall; walls covered within days in silk-screen posters, stencils, graffiti murals and tags; oversized paste-ups by Lolo Góngora, Paloma Rodríguez, Fab Ciraolo and Caiozzama; the Colectivo de Serigrafía Instantánea and the Brigada de Propaganda Feminista printing mostly anonymous silk-screens and stencils; 'No + Miedo' and 'No + Abusos' from the art actions of CADA; LasTesis's 'Un violador en tu camino'; Pikachu, the Joker and PareMan; muralist brigades since the 1960s)
  17. 'Durante el estallido social efectivamente existieron daños oculares, pero la cifra de casos que entrega el candidato Artés es imprecisa', 24 Horas, fact-checking, 18 November 2021 (https://www.24horas.cl/elecciones-2021/fact-checking/durante-el-estallido-social-efectivamente-existieron-danos-oculares: the INDH report of March 2020 recorded 460 eye injuries, 45 of them loss or rupture of the eyeball)
  18. Wikipedia (es), 'Un violador en tu camino' (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_violador_en_tu_camino: LasTesis's performance, first staged in Valparaíso on 20 November 2019 and in Santiago on 25 November, its lyric naming the oppressive state a rapist)
  19. Wikipedia (es), 'Plebiscito constitucional de Chile de 2022' (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plebiscito_constitucional_de_Chile_de_2022: rejection of the draft constitution in September 2022, also noted in Sanhueza's review)

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