The artist who paints murals with the blood of those tattooed in Colombia

Given the rejection they face as donors in Colombia, a group of tattooed men gave their blood to the urban artist Julián Castillo to paint two murals rejecting violence.

While Castillo draws a sketch of the works on a wall, seven young people from Siloé, a poor and stigmatised neighbourhood in the city of Cali (southwest), submit to the needle and syringe.

With blood mixed with pigment and paint, the 29-year-old artist begins to capture the face of Puerto Rican rapper and activist Residente, and the "Dove of Peace" by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso.

In Colombia, health regulations restrict those with tattoos or piercings from donating blood to medical centres for months.

"The idea is that the blood that cannot save lives can be put to good use," Castillo said. At the tip of a brush and with about 200 millilitres of the liquid, "I wanted to pay homage to those icons that generate good things," adds the portraitist who set a Guinness record in 2018 by drawing a mural with 1,200 pencils.

A native of Roldanillo, a municipality north of Cali permeated by drug trafficking, Castillo insists on making a "call for peace" in a country plagued by inequality and six decades of armed conflict with more than nine million victims, most of them displaced. .

This time, to honour two of his idols, he used his tattooed friends from Siloé who have experienced violence "in their own flesh."

In 2021, this marginal neighbourhood embedded in the mountains of the third largest city in Colombia, where 36.6% of the people are poor, was the epicentre of the protests against the government of Iván Duque, who, faced with the social outbreak, had to abandon the project. of law with which he intended to raise taxes on the middle class in the midst of a pandemic.

During one of the mobilisation days, three young people died in Siloé in the midst of police repression, which was harshly condemned by the international community.

One of them was an artist and friend of John Guevara, an "unfit" to donate due to the five tattoos on him.

"Today it is easier for me to donate blood so that murals can be done for the benefit of art and culture," says the 39-year-old welder.