Case study #22 Flower Power, Public Space, Street Art and Reality




 



Banksy, Without Limits, is in Chile and it costs $25 AUD to see his street art inside the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Centre for Art, Culture, and People (GAM), Santiago de Chile. Children under 8 are admitted free. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, various Universities in the Cultural Capital of Australia (Melbourne) have released a post COVID book called "Let's Go Outside". I went outside last weekend to exercise my democratic right to protest and was stoned by Banky's Flower Throwers who had never given up their rocks or Molotov cocktails. Both are pictured below with the rock thrower image taken by me from the receiving end last weekend. The location of the incendiary bomb-thrower is identifiably the corner of Irene Morales and Alameda, Ground Zero from 2019. Banksy's exhibition is a perfect bookend for this free, street performance of surreal, deadly, insurrectional violence that began on18 October 2019. Banksy's real-life throwers are continually laying wreaths for the death of democratic dialogue, every Friday night in the decimated Plaza Baquedano of Ground Zero in which the GAM is located. A dignifying act that is not part of the Banksy exhibition but is free of charge and real.

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