City to City: Interview with Allyson Alapont (Porto Alegre, Brazil)

How did you get started into street art and what do you enjoy most about putting your work into public space? I have been doing street art since last month. I have finished a course about stencil art and after that I started to think about my own projects. What I really enjoy on putting my art into public space is the fact that maybe I will never know what people will think about it and what they say to another person when they see it. This curiosity is even better when you put something on the street and it disappears. How would you describe Porto Alegre as a city for making public art? I would say Porto Alegre has a lot of nice places to make public art, but there are a wave of vandalism on the city. Grafitti art you can see everywhere, we have lots of good artists in this area. As natural, the old citizens are not acostumated with street art, they generalize all of them and they say that's all vandalism. But a big part of the young citizens really enjoy art and accept it, so they are our mean public. What my friends and I are trying to introduce on the city is an art that plays with people, making them confused or suprised, because for years they walk looking the same walls, the same streets and places and then an artist goes there and changes something on that area. The results are amazing and it makes people change their thought about that area. Are there a lot of artists there who put work up? As I said, there are lots of good grafitti artists and they came from the suburb of Porto Alegre where the hip-hop culture is very big. In these days I have seen a stencil that shows a child disappered, actually the child is not disappered and it is spread all over the city. Have you put up work in other cities? I just get into street art, so I didn't have this opportunity yet. But of course I have plans for another cities, like Caxias do Sul, São Paulo,Manaus and Montevideo. The stencil w/the hanging dog is really amazing but with the boy holding it up is even better. What inspired this piece for you? I could say that it cames from Brazil's reality, a huge country with the third biggest social difference. I made this stencil on a poor area and they don't even know what is stencil and they don't even know how a "real" fox can be showed on the wall. So the results are exciting, because they stay excited with this kind of work. About the fox is an idea of mine to spread it on the city, just for fun. The antenna on its head is my own mark, and the antenna is nice because it makes people imagine more about it that it really is. What are your future plans? I'm only 18 years old, so I got lots of things to do. I'm going to make a web site, where everybody will have access to see my work. I have already started with a project, it's called SUPERCONDENSADOR, it consists of do stencil art in the homelesses' and crazy street people's clothes. They are really enjoying it. With this project we can show the Brazil's reality and how these slaves of system survives.