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“Ciro” grew up on the streets of Comuna 13 deeply immersed in hip-hop culture at a time when Medellín was known as the most dangerous city in the world. In the late 1990s, Ciro – an artist who goes by only one name – was a young street rapper in a group called “Censura Extrema”, making music in a neighborhood that became the epicenter of ” Operation Orion”, a controversial government initiative involving paramilitary groups in brutal combat that killed dozens of people in the first four days and resulted in hundreds residents have “disappeared” in the daily battles against the drug lords.
Two decades later, Medellín and Comuna 13 have changed significantly. Ciro attributes this change to an upward cultural shift with hip-hop music, graffiti and street dancing.
“I discovered hip-hop in the middle of the shootings,” Ciro told OZY. “It was another era. The [civil] the war was raging here, the drug wars were raging.
Today, Ciro is an instructor at “Casa Kolacho”, a project that offers free courses to graffiti artists, DJs, rappers and breakdancers with the aim of continuing this cultural revolution for the next generation. Visual artists have transformed the neighborhood with graffiti that has become famous across the country. Comuna 13 is now known more for its graffiti tours and street culture than for its dark history.
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I discovered hip-hop in the middle of the shootings.
-Ciro  |
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This cultural revolution also brought tourism to the neighborhood and more money in the cash registers of local businesses, which reduced both poverty and violence.
“People use this word ‘gentrification,'” Ciro said. “For us, this change could not be more positive. Cities change. Life changes. And if that means neighbors no longer struggling in extreme poverty, thinking of resorting to crime just to survive, to me that’s a good thing.
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Ciro said he learned to rap from a neighbor who used to stream hip-hop from his house at all hours of the day and night, even amid gunfights between rival street gangs or police raids on suspected guerrillas. The neighbor’s musical tastes earned him a reputation as a “satanist”, but Ciro was intrigued.
“You had kids who dreamed of being gangsters for power, for money. You had other kids who wanted to join the war, fight the government and the system they saw as oppressing them. But this kid just wanted to rap,” Ciro recalled.
Ciro befriended his neighbor at school. One night, while returning home, an argument in the neighborhood escalated into gunfire and, to escape, Ciro ran into the neighbor’s house. Listening to hip-hop records until the fighting died down, Ciro discovered his passion.
“That was it,” he said. “We started to learn rap. For us, it was a way of turning the environment we lived in into art. Ciro said rapping gave him a voice to talk about murders, shootings, gangs, and the positives in life, like dancing, art, and street parties.
“In the school cafeteria, in churches, wherever we could find space, we started to build a community around hip-hop,” he explained.
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We started to learn rap. For us, it was a way of turning the environment we lived in into art.
-Ciro |
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Casa Kolacho evolved from these local spaces and was founded by the same artists who created the Comuna 13 cultural scene. It offers free classes for interested young people and pays rent through private events and a small indoor café.
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Neroanother Casa Kolacho teacher, leads freestyle rap classes and is also a local performer and audiovisual producer.
“For years people told me that freestyle rap can’t be learned,” Nerón told OZY. “But that’s just not true, as we’ve proven,” he smiles before launching into an impromptu freestyle about journalism, music and the importance of rap to Casa Kolacho.
Nerón says learning rap is like studying jazz. “There are a series of technical tools and exercises that can be taught: rhythm, memorization of rhyme structures, vocabulary. Improvisation is not only an art, it is also a science.
The rap coach decided to become a teacher at Casa Kolacho after witnessing the transformation hip-hop was going through in his neighborhood. Like Ciro, he discovered hip-hop in his early teens. Even though he worked as a bank clerk during the day to pay his bills, he would go out at night, always in a suit and tie, and engage in rap battles with his peers.
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Improvisation is not only an art, it is also a science.
– Nero |
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“Imagine being beaten in a freestyle battle by a guy who looks like a banker,” he said with a laugh. Nerón says music has always been his primary passion, even when work took him in other directions.
Eventually, Nerón left the bank and returned to the neighborhood to devote himself fully to working with “the little buddies” at Casa Kolacho. Since then, he has taught several generations of Comuna 13’s rising hip-hop stars.
“I do what I love now,” he said. “Sharing the history of the neighborhood and sharing knowledge with the next generation. The last class graduated two months ago and now they are absolute machines on ‘las plazas’,” he said, referring to the informal venues for freestyle battles.
It is difficult to overstate the importance that Casa Kolacho has had on Comuna 13, where hundreds of young people have transformed their lives through culture, music and art. While some stay to pass on their knowledge to the next generation, others have pushed their skills beyond Comuna 13 to become popular rappers in the city’s robust music scene.
“And it’s not just hip-hop that’s driving this cultural revolution,” Ciro pointed out, noting that every corner of Comuna 13 is now a place for street dancing and every wall a space for art. He said there are now more than 300 social organizations in the neighborhood, including those dedicated to dance, reggaeton, Afro-Colombian music, “salsa choce” and more.
“We are living and leading a cultural renaissance in Medellín,” he said.
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How could the success of Casa Kolacho be replicated in a neighborhood or city you know?
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