A haven for the Puerto Rican Indie Scene
This weekend the run-down streets of Santurce, one of the most popular boroughs of San Juan, were splashed with neon spray paint, filled up with hundreds of euphoric college students, and rejuvenated with punk/grunge/urban/indie music blaring from the massive amplifiers on stage. Santurce es Ley, one of Puerto Rico’s youthful and rebellious art installments, was the perfect stage for the promotion of Puerto Rico’s art movements, as the growing interest in urban music and art attracted a younger crowd.
Santurce es Ley (abbreviated as SEL4) celebrated its fourth installment this past Friday, Saturday and Sunday by inviting some of the finest and most talented graffiti artists in Puerto Rico to revitalize Santurce’s abandoned buildings and walls with their very own surreal creations.
Moreover, Santurce is Ley hosted several other exhibitions held in ice cream trucks, where numerous art pieces were hung. And if this wasn’t creative enough, one of the exhibitions in la Calle Cerra required that the observer used a flashlight in order to see the painting through the smoke (created by the smoke machine installed inside the truck). After walking out of the exhibition, one girl said to her companion: “I felt as if I were dreaming. It was a hell of a multisensory experience.”
One of the most anticipated parts of this event, however, was the music concert, which featured indie artists like Alegría Rampante, Campo-Formio, Fuete Billete, Dax Díaz, Unochosiete, Moreira, among many others. This was a wonderful display of the Island’s upcoming artists, since most of them still remain somewhat unknown in Puerto Rico’s mainstream music scene.
*The pictures were taken by Samuel Nemir Olivares and the article was written by Cristina Pérez Reyes