This footage was filmed and produced 8 February 2021.
Puente del Grafitero, the bridge where 16-year-old Diego Felipe Becerra was shot and killed by police in 2011. The police subsequently attempted to cover up the crime, planting a weapon at the scene and claiming Diego Felipe was a criminal who had robbed a bus. The bridge has since become a site of commemoration of Diego Felipe’s life, a memorial to this violent event, presenting a narrative which disputes the sequence of events put forward by the police and the portrayal of Diego Felipe as a vandal and a criminal.
The bridge also represents the mobilisation of graffiti artists, their demonstration of their right to paint and the much wider scope of police abuse – in graffiti that state ‘They shoot us because they fear us’ or ‘We do it at night so as not to die’. As well as a collection of paintings, murals, stencils and graffiti writing, the bridge is a meeting place for artists from different subcultures. This is a collective movement, where everyone has experienced some form of police abuse or threats for practicing street art. The bridge has been repainted various times and this performative act of repainting the bridge demonstrates the continual flux between sustaining memories and emphasising the ephemeral nature of graffiti in itself.