Street Artists Are Fighting South African Housing Corruption With Pink Splashes Of Paint
Street artist Yazmany Arboleta is calling attention to the decrepit housing conditions and fraudulent landlords in Johannesburg with coats of hot pink.
Images viaSummer is often a time to try bold new things. Some people will take foreign vacations, others will finally start exercising and attempt a lifestyle change. Colombian-born street artist Yazmany Arboleta, on the other hand, has been spent his summer leading a team of street artists as they splatter the most decrepit, abandoned buildings in Johannesburg, South Africa with vivid bursts of pink paint. In a project called #BewareOfColour, Arboleta and his comrades-in-paint actually break into the abandoned buildings to slather window panes and staircases with pigment in order to draw attention to the problems arising from Johannesburg's crumbling housing and real estate infrastructure.
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Arboleta and his team of about 30 local street artists thoroughly research their targets, making sure to hit buildings that are truly abandoned. One of the aforementioned problems they're drawing attention to is the corrupt squatter culture in Johannesburg—impoverished squatters are often forced to pay rent to illegitimate 'landlords,' despite the fact that the crumbling houses have no electricity or running water.These issues motivate many of Arboleta's community-based art movements, such as the 10,000 biodegradable balloons he released in Kabul in 2013. According to Artnet, Arboleta says these kinds of actions are meant "to engage communities in a process of reinvention through art. Using our collective imagination, we orchestrate interventions that transform public spaces.”In a blog post for Voices of Africa, Arboleta elaborates on his motivations for taking on the heavy task of confronting authority, including how the project lead to his arrest. "Consider windowless buildings," he writes. "Bleeding and gutted buildings. Consider a system in which government and privately owned buildings are left uncared for from block to block throughout the heart of a city."Here are some images of the pink-splattered buildings Arboletta and his team tagged throughout the summer:
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