Orgosolo's Street Art
Orgosolo is a small town high in the mountains of Sardinia, perched on a steep hillside and world-famous for its politically motivated murals. Being a leftist and a street-art lover, this was a “must see” place high in my list of travel priorities. I finally managed to visit it in September 2016, if only for a day. These pictures depict just a few of the many great murals of Orgosolo. The process was initiated by Francesco Del Casino, a local teacher and a communist activist, who, in the 1970s and 1980s, began to work with marginalised youths in an art project that is still very much alive today.
Picasso meets folk art in Sardinia...
Orgosolo used to be known as Sardinia's unofficial capital of rural banditry. Not any more.
The town also has a proud tradition of anti-authoritarian social and political struggles.
Elements of Picasso's Guernica can be found in many murals. They do not seem out of place if Orgosolo.
The April 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdos Square in Baghdad, shortly after the Iraq War invasion, represented the beginning of a new era in the history of the world. In Orgosolo, the artist asks: "how many innocents should be massacrated for the end of tyrant?".
This mural was painted just two weeks after the 11/9 attacks that killed 2,996 people in New York.
"Shepherds and workers united against the landowners and the bourgeois government".
"We are all clandestine migrants".
The war crimes perpetrated by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank are not forgotten.
Che Guevara's farewell letter to his children: "Above all be sensitive, in the deepest areas of yourselves, to any injustices committed against whoever it may be anywhere in the world".
Antonio Gramsci, one of the world's greatest Marxist thinkers, was born in Sardinia, not far from Orgosolo.
Obama, Berlusconi, and the town's dead...
Eugène Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" adapted to our times...
"11 September 1973: The fascist Chilean military, backed by the CIA, implement a coup d'etat". As troops surrounded La Moneda presidential palace, the socialist president Salvador Allende gave his last speech vowing not to resign.