Cultural responses to swine flu — in art, in behavior, in language — have proliferated almost as rapidly as the virus itself. Here’s an example that might inspire you to chase down this angle on H1N1.
Last week, we posted some photos of H1N1 street art that you can use on your site. Guilherme Tavares left a comment, saying he had made one of the pig stencils we featured. He’s a 27-year-old graphic designer and photographer living in Pelotas, Brazil, who “always had a crush on the street art, specially stencils with clever/ironic messages, like the work of Banksy.” I asked Tavares why he’d taken on H1N1. He sent back this terrific response:
The idea of the masked pig came, of course, in the middle of the swine-flu crisis that was all over the news [this spring]. I thought I could use that to create some kind of curiousity-teaser street art thing. I immediately thought of doing a masked pig, and then I realized it would be more expressive and iconic if I used a gas mask. I believe the gas mask has a stronger meaning and does a better parody of the whole “fear” situation being spreaded. It resembles other kinds of situations of massive fear like times of war, when people were afraid of chemical weapons, anthrax, etc. Also the shape of the gas mask looks more like the pigs face, and also has something of science fiction within it. There isn’t one specific meaning, but the point is the image is strong enough to recall lots of meanings from situations like the one we were living. So I believe it works great as an ironic cartoon of the whole thing.
I wanted to capture the attention of people out on streets. The catch is that everybody was afraid of “bumping into the flu” somewhere, but suddenly they bump into it as an art form, a pig with a mask on a wall, quietly watching you. They might find it strange, they might laugh about it, the importance is that they will think about it. Who is that pig after all? Is is just a pig or does it represent the flu? Who is wearing that mask, me or the pig? Maybe the pig is the people and the exagerated mask represents the exagerated fear, the mask of fear that the media was putting in people’s heads, once again. The point is to provoke more questions than answers, actually.
By the time I had the stencil cut out I called a friend of mine to help me with the painting. This guy was Fabricio Marcon. [...]
There were no specific criteria to choose the walls. We wanted not just busy places, but places where people would actually see it and have time to think about it. And of course, no private places, no house walls, we are no vandals. So the first one we painted is the one you posted on your blog. That wall surrounds an empty field and is already full of graffiti. It is located next to a park where people hang out, so definitely people would have time to see the pig, think and talk about it. This is in the northern area of the city.
The second one, we took no picture. We drove to the southern area of the city and painted at the wall of the Art and Design Institute (where we graduated, actually). It is also right in front of an outdoor pub where art students hang out, so once again, they would see the job and have the time to discuss it.
By the time we did the third and last one, our cardboard stencil was almost destroyed, so we decided to do a last paint in the actual center of the city, where hundreds of people walk every day. We drove around and found that pink wooden wall (which is a construction barrier) and decided to do it there because of the pink color that would match with the pig figure.[...]
Tavares and Marcon worked on their H1N1 pigs as an art collective they called “quemfoiquefez?” — which means “whodidthat?” in Porguguese. See more photos of their swine-flu art here.