This is the second of a two-part Fotolog special on street art. Read part 1 here.

Art in Buenos Aires is the blonde student with the Che Guevara shirt ignoring the Peruvian immigrant playing a guitar for coins. It’s a poem with gut-punching insight scrawled on a wall next to expletives and inanities. It is socialism with fascist roots; solidarity with Cuba and a guilty craving for a time when we could pretend we were Almost European. It is inflation and corruption but at least we’re not Bolivia.

It is a centrifuge for artists always on the edge of a breakthrough, sucking brilliance into its heart from Latin America and beyond.

It is art that wants to be Picasso and art that wants to be hip hop and art that just wants to be a fist in the air saying Me Too. Buenos Aires plasters its contradictions on the walls.

Photographs by Joy