Oz Montanía, an internationally acclaimed illustrator and street artist from Asunción, is one of the first people to ever have painted on the walls of his home country back in the late 1990s. After that a lot has happened, but only very recently has street art began to gain ground in the eyes of common Paraguayans. And we owe a lot of that to Oz. As a pioneer in the country’s graffiti scene, he has worked his ass off keeping this multifaceted subculture alive and finally bringing it into broad daylight within larger audiences. Culminating into the opening of Asunción’s first graffiti shop and into the city hosting one of the first Latin American urban art festivals, gone are the days of paint smuggling and a few random tags in street corners. So, homeboys, watch out: Asunción is breaking loose! Meet Oz Montanía and discover the rise of Paraguayan street art…

Back in the day: influence from abroad

“In Paraguay, everything happens later than in other countries”, Oz Montanía begins with his calm voice, sitting comfortably on a red sofa in the backroom of his shop. “Whereas in Brazil street art existed already around 40 years ago, it didn’t land in Paraguay until more than 20 years later”, he continues and states that still in the 1980s, the only people who even knew such a thing existed, where the people who had lived or traveled in the US or Europe and had seen a part of this underground culture. “When I was 11-years-old, me and my friends would meet up in a skate park and exchange magazines and videos that we would then look at in awe”. Gladly, Oz’s parents owned a book distribution company, so reading about things came naturally for him. Hence, the small kid would suck up all the information he could find he could find from those worn-down magazines.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the first tags started appearing on the streets of Asunción. “In the beginning, we were around five people…Diestro, Saturn, Legacy, Joma…spraying on walls in the entire country”, Oz tells. “We were literally only a handful of people and we all knew each other personally”, he recalls. But all of a sudden, foreign tags started appearing out of nowhere. “It was like a dialogue. There was someone else doing the same thing as us. Someone we didn’t know and that was really cool.” Bit by bit, the scene started to grow.

Oz and other self-taught smugglers

One of the biggest challenges in the beginning was that there was no one to teach things. Although Oz Montanía had been drawing since he was a kid, he never studied visual arts. Therefore, graffiti was something to be learned from scratch. As it was all so fresh, the good thing was that there were also no rivalries between artists. “The scene is quite different in other countries. In Brazil, for example, there has always been a huge clash between the pixadores and the graffiti artists, and the graffiti artists are very careful not to paint on the works of pixadores and vice versa. Because if they did, they could get some beef”, Oz tells.

Another challenge was paint acquisition. Still only a year ago, there was no established place to buy quality paints in Paraguay. Not one single graffiti shop existed even in the capital city of Asunción and as done for the past 20 years, artists would smuggle paints across borders, mainly from Brazil. “We would use whatever means we could imagine”, Oz Montanía recalls and tells that sometimes paints were even brought into the country on small boats. “Just for personal use, not for selling, though”, he adds. Then, around 13 months ago, Oz’s shop, PowerLine was opened. “We started this shop with my business partner, Santo, who I met at a Meeting of Styles event in Buenos Aires many years ago. He had a shop in Buenos Aires, but when the economy of Argentina started going down, around four years ago he had the idea to start a second PowerLine in Montevideo, Uruguay. Then, a couple of years later, we started this one in Asunción.” Now, PowerLine is also an official distributor of the Spanish paint brand, Montana Colors, so it seems that the times of illegal smuggling are over. At least for Oz.

PowerLine Asunción:

O’Leary 299 esq Palma, local 6
Asunción 1221

Present day: creating an identity

Nowadays, there are around 80 street artists in Asunción. “The kids who start painting nowadays, don’t start from precariousness. They have it a lot easier than us pioneers, because they can see and learn things on the streets, in magazines, on Youtube…”, Oz says. In addition to that, many new street artists have studied either graphic design or fine arts, which is quite different from how it all started. However, according to Oz, the identity of Paraguayan street art is yet to be discovered and developed. “There’s a long road ahead of us”, he says and continues that as it’s all still very new, what Paraguayan street artists lack is long-term, constant practice. “This applies to everything in this country, but the good side of it all is that it’s super easy to develop something new and be the first one here to do it”, he says. In fact, Oz’s vision for the future is to live in Paraguay, but at the same time travel and import what he learns abroad into his home country. “Before there was a lot of brain-drain from here to other countries, but nowadays I think there’s a booming generation of people who want to make art, music and other creative things. People, who don’t want to see this place asleep anymore”, he speculates.

The country of no rules

As all countries, also in Paraguay has seen a separation between street art and traditional graffiti, but according to Oz, both parties coexist in harmony. “The common denominator for us all is that we want this culture to grow”, Oz says and adds that this doesn’t leave any time for fighting. The only challenge is that in Paraguay there are no rules. “In other countries, graffiti artists are very orthodox”, Oz says. “The rules of the game are strict: you can’t write on someone else’s work, you have to be anonymous, you can’t make money with it, real graffiti is illegal etc., but here, people do what they want”, he says. This can be seen as both good and bad and even Oz doesn’t agree with all the rules. “I don’t understand, for example, why a graffiti artist couldn’t earn money with what he does. Mcs do it, djs do it, b-boys do it…so, why shouldn’t writers do it?”, he asks. In fact, if it weren’t for a couple of commissions received doing some big walls, the whole shop we’re sitting in wouldn’t exist. “Traditional graffiti will and should always keep on existing, but what matters in the end is that everything is valuable. Illegal or not, paid or not”, he concludes.

LatidoAmericano: urban art in Paraguay

This year (2016) in August, Asunción was the first non-Peruvian city to host LatidoAmericano, a Latin American festival for urban art. The curators of the event were Oz and Peruvian artist Entes, but how did it all start? “In 2011 I met Entes and Pésimo, two Peruvian graffiti artists who belong to the same crew as me, the DMJC (one of the oldest crews in Peru with around 35 members), at an urban art event”, Oz begins. “We painted side-by-side and got into talking about the lack of a more Latin American, native event”, he continues. By that time, they had all attended various street art events around the World, but the dominance in all of them was always either European or North American, which didn’t go hand-in-hand with what they wanted to do. “The main difference with the European and US artists is that they’re all very individualistic”, Oz says. “For them it’s more of a personal process, whereas for us it’s much more collective”, he explains. According to Oz, with Latin Americans there’s no need to agree on what kind of murals to do, as they’re simply born on their own.

Rediscovering Paraguay

So, in 2012, Latin America saw its first Latino-only urban art festival in Miraflores, Lima, Peru. A couple of years later it was decided that the same kind of event would be organized in Asunción, Paraguay, as soon as possible. However, it took years of hard work before the people from the Management of the Historic Center finally listened to Oz in January 2016. “There was one person particularly, Carla, who really believed in us and fought for this project to happen”, Oz tells. “In fact, if it wasn’t for her, it probably never would have happened”, he says. In the end, LatidoAmericano was the first project to be realized from the 40 pilot projects of PlanCHA (Plan Centro Histórico Asuncíon), a plan created by the municipality in order to revitalize the Historic Center of Asunción.

However, the approval of the Management was merely the start of all the work. In addition to 3,5 years of convincing, Oz scouted over 650 walls in the historic center, took photos of all of them, talked to influencers, contacted the artists and planned the theme of the event with them. It was decided that the theme would be: rediscovering Paraguay (Paraguay, pronounced with the last y gutural, is the original name of Asunción). After that, Carla Linares (who was in charge for the historic part of the project) searched for historic information about Asunción, although also the artists themselves did a lot of research before reaching Paraguay. “Only two of the 35 artists had been here before, so they were really curious about the place”, Oz tells. He recalls how most of the them would go through numerous books, museums and whatnot, not only back home but also immediately upon their arrival in Asunción. “These people don’t want to just paint something, they really want to contextualize their work”, he states. Many of them also changed their flights back home, because they fell in love with the country and its vibe. “People had very few expectations on this country, so when they were here, it was all like one big, positive surprise to them”, Oz says.

44 murals by 35 artists

During the the week-long festival, the artists worked passionately on the rediscovery of Paraguay. The end result is amazing: 44 murals in 40 different places, done by 35 artists from 12 different countries. Many different styles and techniques united by the spirit of Latin America and the mystic history of Asunción, turned from a purely aesthetic experience into a playground of past and present. Only one of the murals has been painted over by this date, because the religious owner of the house didn’t approve its supposedly ‘satanic symbolism’. “But that’s how it is”, Oz says, “as a graffiti artist you learn to let go. Sometimes your works are there for only a few weeks and all what’s left of them afterwards is a photo or two for people to look at”. However, right now in Asunción, you don’t have to look at pictures or enter galleries to see the rest of the works. All you have to do is simply open your eyes and look around. And please do it, because this project is like a time machine which lets you enjoy the flow of present Latin American urban art whilst simultaneously rooting you deeper into the ground you’re standing on. So, people, get your asses to Asunción and check it out yourselves! And if you can’t do it, at least check out the pictures and videos below to see the rest of the works and the process involved in creating them.

LatidoAmericano on social media:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Latidoamericano-337882986312128/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPlQf7yzuFmmHi_WqjsMlKA
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/latidoamericano/
Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/142877097@N08/page2

Strangerless TIP: street art by bicycle

The pieces of LatidoAmericano are all located in the historic center of Asunción, and as the distances are relatively small, it’s completely feasible to see them all on foot. I personally love rambling the street of Asunción on a bicycle. So, if you can get access to one, I advice you to do the same. Just keep in mind that cars are not too used to seeing cyclists on the roads and, therefore, don’t always remember to watch out for cyclists too attentively. Here are pics of my bicycle in front of  some of the street level murals of Asunción. (it’s not a very varying model, but still, I enjoy photographing it.)

Map of LatidoAmericano Paraguay:

JPG: https://strangerless.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Map-LatidoAmericano-Paraguay-2016.jpg

How I met Oz?

I first heard about the murals from my first Couchsurfing host in Asunción, Yobana, right upon my arrival. She told me about a map illustrating all the street art works in town and I was dying to see them. Soon thereafter, I visited the city center, spotting a large number of the paintings on my own and snapping some random pictures of them. Later the same week, me and my second Couchsurfing host César, went to his favorite bar Rockero (which, by the way, is a place definitely worth going to, if in town!), which is where I was introduced to Oz. (Something like: “Sissi the cyclist, meet Oz, the guy behind Latidoamericano and the most well-known graffiti artist in town.”)