CHILE: Salvador J. Seda – Historian Streetart Hunter and GraffitiPreBicentenario

When you look on the photographs and the way how Salvador Seda presents and documents his fantastic findings you probably will get quite often the word historian in mind. He definitely is an ambitious street art hunter but he is as well a wonderful history lover with an excited focus and patient eye for the little details. Salvador is a searcher for the specialties what urban life can offer, and mostly you just have to look closer and notice your surrounding a bit more than your Smartphone while you are walking through the city. Therefore Salvador gives impulses and tries as well to teach a little bit about the background of wall paintings in the city.

On his Instagram account GraffitiPreBicentenario he started a documentation of the streetart and graffiti artworks in the streets of Santiago before the bicentennial. Salvador collected definitely a lot, many fabulous pieces are already online and a lot are still to come. In the end graffiti and streetart can have many positive effects while percepting it. And even if just for the fact that it is a piece of art, an urban creation. And after some time there is mostly some renovation on the house, construction on the wall, the building is completely gone or just simply somebody else painted over.

So in the end, the remains and memories are just saved in the photos of those great artworks. That’s why it is important to have some passionate people who are photographing and ambitiously saving the visually images, so later on other interested people can enjoy exploring, watching and getting a little glimpse of how it must have looked like once.

Salvador is part of the Vagabundler team to save and store the awesome graffiti footage on this world. He is building up the Streetart Map of Angol at the moment and he fills up the archive with brilliant artworks from graffiti pieces to adventurous urbex photo shootings.

Salvador does not only contribute photos, mostly he also writes a little story about the artworks and the place with historical background, and as well he tries to mention the involved artists.

On the Angol Map you can find magnificent photographs of graffiti which stays for ages. In smaller cities there is not that much competition between writers, so the crossing doesn´t even really happen and artworks stay for decades. Very nice, interesting and good for documenting urban art existence in long term development.

Salvador about the project GraffitiPreBicentenario:  “Angol is so small but I found more and more things related to graffiti every day. So in a big city like Santiago there is a never ending history. That’s why I created the Instagram account GraffitiPreBicentenario. I was taking photos of graffiti for more than two years almost everyday and today I have more than 70,000 photos of graffiti from that time in history. Suddenly I realized that this was a never ending story because you returned to a place and there was another graffiti, so again a photo and so on… It started to become psychotic stuff. So how to finish my work? Well, when Chile was approaching its bicentennial as a independent country, I decided to finish my work one day before that important date. There the name GraffitiPreBicentenario. And then it was time to show and present it to others.”


Salvador made an interesting documentary for the Centro Cultural Angol about the Angol Map and the urban art archive in two video parts. The language is Spanish, so all Spanish speakers can follow easily. But still if you don’t understand Spanish, the introduction and demonstration of the concept is still understandable and very interesting.


Tutorial Video  –  Part 1  –  Angol Map


Tutorial Video  –  Part 2  –  Angol Map


Meanwhile we have now also started working on the Santiago Map and are filling it with photos and information about great urban works of art from Salvador’s archive.


INFOTHEK

Photographer: Salvador J. Seda

Instagram – [Graffiti & Streetart] – GraffitiPreBicentenario: https://www.instagram.com/graffitiprebicentenario

Instagram – [Graffiti & Streetart] – Graffiti de Chile:  https://www.instagram.com/graffitidechile

Instagram – [Architecture & Photography] – Salvador J. Seda: https://www.instagram.com/salvadorjseda/

Streetart Map Angol: https://vagabundler.com/chile/streetart-map-angol

Streetart Map Santiago:  https://vagabundler.com/chile/streetart-map-santiago