Process
This is the project that documents through the "making of" the work and work of Teo Vázquez "Los hostiles" between 2024 and 2025 for the project of the Arrels Fundació called "Visibles". The final work is a mural work through the old town of the Condal City using the paste-up technique: printing portraits on giant-scale paper fixed on walls and integrating them into the urban landscape with a pretext of visibility.
The "Visibles" project of the Arrels Fundació is an initiative that turns the streets into a space of memory and denunciation. In the places where people used to sleep without a home, the murals show their portraits on a giant scale, turning them into graphic witnesses of their own life stories. Placing those faces on the walls of the city is a symbolic act and a cry on a large scale to continue sensitizing citizens about homelessness, appealing for help and collective action. A help and a success that, year after year, is concentrated in the work and services of the Fundació for all users, to whom a new, more dignified path can be found with the affection of the entire team and the users themselves of Arrels.
The title of the work "Los hostiles" refers to hostility against hostilities: a necessary response from these people who live on the street against the harshness of a city that raises barriers through what is called hostile architecture —benches that prevent lying down, spikes on doorways, spaces designed to exclude— that turn public space into an adverse terrain. In the face of this daily violence, resistance becomes a form of protection: hardening not against people, but against everything that attacks and marginalizes.
Teo Vázquez is a street artist and photographer, born in Cádiz and based in Barcelona. Trained in photography in London and at the Institut d’Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya, he has developed his own language in which he combines portraiture, social awareness, and public space. His technique focuses on paste-up: printing large-format portraits on paper and fixing them on the city's walls, integrating the urban landscape into the work. With this, he transforms streets and squares into scenarios of recognition, making visible those whom society tends to forget.
Credits
Author: Teo Vázquez Bio on Macba website
Promoter: Arrels Fundació Arrels Fundació website
General coordination and direction: Joan Lemus Joan Lemus website
Collaborators: Sherpa Agency · documentation, elaboration of the making of bio and communication/dissemination material Sherpa Agency website
Rocco Marvin & Agustina · wardrobe and coordination with actors (logistics, context setting)
Jesús Fernández · photographic document
Publications