…Sed felis. Phasellus enim. Aliquam malesuada mi eu erat. Suspendisse potenti…

Story

LosOtros is a European-based Anonymous Artistic Cooperativa that carries out Urban Actions, within a poetic and melancholic Post Situationist tradition. Since its inception in 2003, by Mj Tom and his alter ego Andrea Nada, LosOtros are known for their use of wheat pasting and stenciling in the increasingly established arena of Street Art, and for their explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage. Soon after sIsteR jANe joined the group, followed by Life HiJacker and JDM master who later left and was replaced by [ blank ]. As they designate “We are all coming from different backgrounds but we want to apply our creativity in a common effort”.

Credo

LosOtros belong in the intersection between Visual Poetry, a trend that found its development in Brazil, springing from the concrete poetry movement of the decade of 1950, and Urban Art. They surfaced in 2003 as a personal [common] project presenting themselves as a brand against brands, their utopian mission being the antidote to the Society of the Spectacle and what it conveys to the collective unconscious.

Their work captures fragments of life, often forgotten, it echoes the unease and mixes it with the uncomfortable reality of continuous transformations of the urban environment in which it lives. Faces, pseudo familiar situations, characters belonging to various walks of life… they all inject emotions with such a warm identity characterizing the experience of ordinary people, those who would express and convey through the eyes their very own existence.

They use text to express in black and white terms their critical thinking of the fleeting and unyielding reality of our days. Their interventions, while instantly recognizable from the distinctive visual style, contain an inherent fluidity which explores multiple concepts, from technology and consumerism to language and obsolescence.

Their work is not simply a literary installation in the urban space creating emotions of abandonment and desertion ,nor a purely intellectual exercise of rhetorical reflection on collective morality. It is the public utilization of a process typical to conceptual art. The juxtaposition of images and words capable of producing a collective interpretation, aimed at an astute audience that finds not advertising campaigns on the walls of buildings and factories, but rather invitations to investigate the fundamental values of our existence.

With their imagination and technique, irreverent and fleeting, able to define themselves as a Copy Machine of Art, ironic and deliberately anonymous, LosOtros represent the ordinary people; those actors unaware of being protagonists of present days and to be proxy for them in spite of a reality in half-tone that essentially results a kind of summary, which, in the end, happens to simply be life.

Since 2004 they took holidays from everyday life to carry out the

  • FWMP | Few Words, Many Perceptions

  • UTS | Underneath The Surface

  • RV | Recto Verso

[in the city at night] projects where, echoing the situationist concept of detournement, they hijack spaces in the city in most of the cases illegally. They use text and deformed images to create their work, altogether with different media coming from the everyday life. They cover walls and illuminated advertising billboards with austere posters with letters in a strict order that assume the color of the ad posters underneath and take their light, parasitically. Their texts are part poetry, part an inquiry into our collective unconscious. They are intended to be encountered by commuters who don’t know they are art. They attempt to describe in public space what it feels like to live now.

Using, as their languages, Text, Photos, Images altogether with every day materials, they generate meanings through the confrontation of the verbal and visual ones, by creating relations between the codes.

Their recurring themes questions the notions of Beauty, the Construction of Iconicity, Identity, Alienation, Death, Society, Human Relationships, Sex, Façade, Power, Visual Culture, the Political Messaging of Imagery and the Cliché.