If we examine any modernized city, many of the so-called ‘public spaces’ are overcrowded with advertisements. Much of the imagery we see, the work we do, and the places we live in are shaped by capitalism; they are packaged, mass-produced, and designed to make us want more.
But life is more than the dimensions of the box it comes in. You will not learn what it’s like to live in New York from watching all the episodes of Seinfeld, and binging Queen’s Gambit is no substitute for spending a few hours learning to play chess. Similarly, being very active on social media is a poor stand-in for making connections out in the physical world. For artists, breaking their audience out of this endless funnel of fabrication and spectacle.
On a recent trip, I was in Lisbon, waiting with my girlfriend outside a restaurant for our table to be readied, on a street too narrow for cars to travel on. We were in the Mouraria–the Moorish Quarter-an area of the city where pedestrians tend to walk leisurely, untroubled by the bustle of crowds, car traffic, or the historic Tramway in the nearby Martim Moniz Square.
It was lunchtime, and while we tried to avoid hunger pangs with the aromatic smells of cooking wine, cumin, and Bay leaves coming from the kitchen, I looked around at the very charming space we were in. It is a far cry from my block in Brooklyn, and quite picturesque. For one thing, it is arrestingly quiet for being in a dense metropolitan area. The buildings here are old, densely packed, and mostly the same shape, forming a pleasant, antique vibe. On this street that doesn’t appear to have seen much change in the last hundred and fifty years, I notice something odd. On the side of a custard-yellow building next to me, a small man in 3-D glasses appears distressed. He is unbalanced, shocked, and frozen in time; on the brink of falling backward into the fathoms of the 2D world, he seems to have escaped from.
He is unmarked by any signature and bears no trademark or insignia. His hair and beard are unkempt, and he stands only a few inches high. In fact, he is the two-dimensional visage of Antoine Caramalli, an artist and performer originally from Paris.
Like his character balancing on the ledge, Caramalli is a lanky man of 40, with a lively mess of hair and a nose piercing. These days, he is based in Brussels, where he lives with his girlfriend and ten-year-old son. When not working on other projects, Caramalli and his son work together to make new designs for the next installment of Radical Playground, the guerrilla art collective officially responsible for the paste-up I saw on the street that day.
The project was originally started with another of his friends who had to walk away due to other professional commitments, but Caramalli’s work continues on, occasionally making a stir in the cities he visits. “We are an art collective of three: two adults and one child,” he jokes. “Radical Playground is for me, my son, and an artist friend in Italy.” The pieces Caramalli posted on Instagram quickly caught the attention of local street art buffs in Portugal, and he even began to receive shout-outs from street art walking tours, particularly in Lisbon.
“Radical Playground is for me, my son, and an artist friend in Italy.”
The gesticulating man in the 3-D glasses offers a sort of juxtaposition to the mundane order, not unlike eyes in the void that stare back at us if we look closely. But instead of leaving us haunted, he leaves us smiling; happier to have shared in his play in this place, if only for a moment. The range of Radical Playgrounds imagery falls into a few main categories: these wandering men in 3-D glasses, children and animals, and commentary, mostly as metaphors for what French Marxists call “the spectacle.”
According to Caramalli, Radical Playground draws influence from ’everything’, but cites one book, The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord, as particularly informative to the work RP puts out. Published in 1967 (and then made into a movie in 1973), it is a philosophical manifesto, in which Debord lays out a multifaceted polemic against what Marx called ”fetishized consumerism.” In Debord’s opinion—along with that of many young Parisians at the time—the Post War culture had become obsessed with consumerism, and the victorious Western powers had steered social thought into a pacified state of perpetual desire with no inherent substance.
“This book is very famous, and all of us in the French artists’ schools read it,” Caramalli says, recalling the impact it first had on him some twenty years ago. At the time it was published, Debord’s book helped galvanize France’s youth, and as a leading voice of the Situationist International (SI), the international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists, Debord helped usher in an entirely new wave of avant-garde art. Lately, The Society of the Spectacle has made a resurgence in popular culture, as some writers are quick to use Debord’s work as a lens to examine a world with new phenomena like Covid and Trump.
“We were all involved with urban performance and other forms of the street for a long time, but we wanted to create something free of constraints,” Caramalli says of he and his RP colleagues. “We love the Avant-garde, and we want to bring poetry to life.”
“We love the Avant-garde, and we want to bring poetry to life.”
All the collaborators that have been a part of Radical Playground (apart from the ten-year-old) have other professional commitments, and such limitations require operating on a shoestring budget. “For this, the paste-ups are perfect,” Caramalli says. “I do all the drawings myself, and making the pictures is very cheap. It is the fastest, easiest way to get our art on the street.” In fact, paste-ups can be put up in less than five minutes, depending on their size, and Caramalli’s images range from diminutive acrobats, to large animals several feet across, interacting with the human figures in their 3-D glasses.
Some of the pieces aim at the heart of the social ills in our culture like the militarization of police, freedom of speech, and groupthink. One of Caramalli’s images is of a woman, gleefully peering into one of four iPhones mounted on a collar around her neck, is inescapably haunting and just nondescript enough to be anybody. In another, a highway full of standstill traffic is heading towards “The End of The World”, while, just across the median, all the lanes heading towards “New Ways of Life” are empty. Outside my AirBNB in Porto, I noticed a small black and white image of a man pasting a sign that says “No Violence”, just as a policeman in riot gear brings a billy club down on his head.
As provoking as these social and political statements can be, RP’s work seems to shine brightest as the stand-alone characters in 3-D glasses. These little bespectacled men (mostly screened and sketched images of Caramalli himself) are set in all manner of stretched, athletic, and sometimes clumsy postures. One I enjoyed can be found on the side of the street in Barrio Alto in Lisbon, leapfrogging over a twin-headed water spigot.
A few blocks away, another can be seen suspended between a small commemorative placard, (citing the work of street artist Bruno Costa’s inspired tribute series, “Fado”), and a small protruding brick, certifying the structure itself had complied with the architect’s designs for the structure. There, a little Caramalli appears in a desperate balance, his arms and legs stretched to their limit. He is staring at me through his red and blue 3-D glasses, as if to ask for help.
“[The acrobatic characters] allow people to see art as contextual; to play with reality,” says Caramalli. “They can help people see common spaces as even more public, and less restrained by formality. We want to call streets ‘public’ spaces, but so much of our world is becoming privatized that it often feels as though you cannot do anything outside of what is thought to be ‘proper’. You cannot do anything anymore; formality is killing our fun.”
“[The acrobatic characters] allow people to see art as contextual; to play with reality,” says Caramalli. “They can help people see common spaces as even more public, and less restrained by formality. We want to call streets ‘public’ spaces, but so much of our world is becoming privatized that it often feels as though you cannot do anything outside of what is thought to be ‘proper’. You cannot do anything anymore; formality is killing our fun.”
Many times, pedestrians will stroll right past RP’s installations and not even realize it. Some of the figures are no bigger than your hand and can be found perched in the corners of the periphery where they’re less likely to draw a lot of attention. It’s a sort of delightful deviance, a cheerful way for the artist to pique the interest of the wandering eye and invite the mind into a lighter mode. The Debordean critique is that our capitalist need to consume has created a pervasive social lie: that we need to buy things and earn profit to feel completely alive. In this fashion, even our physical spaces in such a world are shaped by that illusion.
This fifty year–old Marxist philosophy feels oddly prescient to the present moment. In a social media-driven world, we’ve embraced a mentality that encourages active vanity as part of life, and that we can’t be fulfilled without pursuing profit and notoriety. As Debord himself put it, fame “has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might actually be capable of doing.” Radical Playground attempts to offer a moment’s respite from this terrible fate. A tiny man diving headlong into a brick wall here, another of a child riding a Leafy Sea Dragon there, and with very little effort, a single man with a couple of paste-ups can transform a concrete jungle from a monument of consumerism and conformity into a whimsical, well-curated walkabout.
“We like to play, and we want to encourage people to play with their environment. For example, with my son and the kids of other friends of the collective, we make the pieces with animals. It gives the children a chance to imagine what they would dream of and create it.”
By now, Radical Playground has touched down in many of the great cities across Italy, and several more throughout Western Europe. In August 2022, Caramalli will finally bring Radical Playground to the United States, with stays planned in New York City and the Bay Area of California.
Thinking back to my first encounter with Caramalli’s handiwork, it is the intervention of his art itself that altered the environment more than anything else in the vicinity. Despite being a single black and white image of a tiny man, appearing to fall backwards, it completely reordered my experience in the space as I discovered it. I couldn’t resist re-evaluating the wall, the stone, the very street itself.
“We like to play, and we want to encourage people to play with their environment. For example, with my son and the kids of other friends of the collective, we make the pieces with animals. It gives the children a chance to imagine what they would dream of and create it. They can make a piece of their imagination totally real, and in a way that makes people think and react.”
