Maricio Valiente, known as Lazaro, which is also the name of his pet terrier who follows him everywhere and whom Maricio affectionatly refers to as his son, is an experimental street artist in Mexico City. Lazaro gets artistic inspiration from the sculptures and murals scattered across the city’s landscape, but he also gets it from the sights and sounds of everyday life that most of us think of as mundane, chaotic, or irritating.
Maricio is a musician and street performer who enacts what he calls “interventions” within the city’s subways and public plazas. The interventions are a form of street performance meant to reorganize the mundane patterns of existence. Lazaro is best known for his Police Car Quartet, an art project he designed and executed in Mexico city in 2009 when he arranged to have four police cars form a public concert with their sirens. The aim of the event was to awaken pedestrians to the city’s soundscape and invite them to re-conceptualise the noises of everyday life. See a link to his work here: (www.fluxfactory.org/events/how-to-make-music-with-police-cars-and-get-away-with-it/)
I asked Lazaro why he thought his type of performance was important in Mexico City. He said he thought that the power of street performers was waning. He told us about Mexico’s famous barrel organists, which are found on the streets in almost every main plaza in the city. The organists wear khaki suits and stand behind hand-cranked music boxes, cranking out traditional Mexican tunes. These organ players are such an integral part of the Mexican urban environment that for many Mexicans their presence and the music they make has become an almost invisible (or ignorable) fixture on the street. But Lazaro explained that when he commissioned a few of the organists to play for a group of inmates in a local prison, many of the prisoners were moved to tears with nostalgia for the characteristic sound of Mexican streets.
Unfortunately, the organs are waning in popularity and Lazaro believes it’s because newer generations can’t relate anymore to the traditional songs the organs play. “If we put more poplar songs in them, songs people recognize as part of their personal musical history, then the organs will not disappear.” But, as soon as he said this, as if to test his own theory, he turned to a couple sitting on a bench behind us and tapped out the rhythm of a traditional Mexican folk song by clapping his hands against his body and making clicking, humming sounds with his mouth. The couple recognized the song and smiled appreciatively.
A few days later, Lazaro made music with his body again. In a planned “intervention”, he entered Insurgentes metro station through the turnstiles and stood for a moment readying himself. Soon he began slapping his chest and thighs and making a loud popping sound by clapping cupped hands close to his puckered lips. His performance lasted about three minutes before police arrived to escort him out of the subway. But before his performance was interrupted, many commuters stopped what they were doing to watch him. Some seemed confused and embarrassed, some seemed alarmed, and some smiled and nodded their heads to Lazaro’s unusual rhythm. Lazaro obeyed the police and politely left the metro station to the sound of modest applause.