There is a constant commotion these days on Hornsey Road, the street in Finsbury Park in north London. A fauna of curious people, journalists and instagrammers piles up around the new work of street artist Banksy, which has revolutionized this multicultural neighborhood. Two Japanese girls take selfies, a group of British girls dressed like for the cover of Vogue They take turns taking photos of each other. A BBC journalist looks for any statement among the group of curious people who have come to the neighborhood.
In the middle of the spontaneous circus, a beautiful and noble wildly pruned cherry tree—topped, would be the correct expression, because its crown has disappeared—stands like a kind of iron candelabra in the middle of the urban landscape.
Banksy's painting—the artist claimed authorship on his Instagram account—precisely aims to denounce sacrilege. On the white side wall of an apartment complex located just behind the tree (a surface coveted by any graffiti artist), the author has painted a huge green stain that slides down the wall like moss vines. In one corner, a woman appears to be fumigating the nonexistent foliage from the now mutilated branches.
“Little by little, I began to feel horrified. Heartbroken before the tribe of journalists who were recording the scene and the crowd of curious onlookers who were murmuring and raising their mobile phones to take a photo,” she wrote in the pages of The Guardian the writer Gio Iozzi, who founded the organization in defense of urban trees Haringey Tree Protectors. “All this cackling focused on the work of a human being had lost sight of the fundamental question of what happened: how is it possible that a mature urban tree has been pruned so aggressively, to the point that it can never regenerate again? or to bloom in all its splendor when spring arrives?” Iozzi asks.
The county of Islington, to which the neighborhood belongs, assures that the tree, which is now between 40 and 50 years old, had entered a process of decline. It was sick and had been damaged by fungus.
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The owner of Thor´s Trees, the company that carried out the pruning, has assured the BBC that municipal officials gave them instructions “down to the smallest detail” of how they wanted the work to be carried out. The topping technique, explains Lawrence-Thor Stephen, helps to ensure that the branches, which in this species grow upwards, do not increase too much in size and could fall on a pedestrian, due to the tree's disease.
It is likely that Banksy intended to denounce the disappearance of nature in the urban landscape, by linking his work with the tree in question. By moving a few meters away from the scene, the viewer can imagine that the stain painted by the artist once again repopulates the cherry tree with leaves. But the truth is that the conversations of the curious revolve more these days around the beauty or ugliness of the artist's work, or about the revaluation that homes touched by the hand of genius can have.
Islington County has already instructed the municipal team that is normally responsible for removing graffiti from the neighborhood to respect the new Banksy.
A controversial artist
On Wednesday morning, two huge white spots appeared on the author's work, as if someone had thrown paint to ruin it. Some neighbors lamented the apparent hooliganism – Banksy's urban pieces, with an increasingly crazy price, are saved from entering that category – but others remembered that it was the same artist who once planned the live shredding of one of his paintings, in the middle of his auction. The result of that prank was that the canvas, or what was left of it, hanging from the frame where Banksy had hidden a paper shredder, saw its value double. Perhaps the vandalism of the work came from the author himself.
The owners of the building on which the new genius of the anonymous street artist has appeared have already put fences around it to try to protect the added value. Next to the cherry tree, a small sign prohibits people from climbing the tree. Curiosity is insatiable, and many have already jumped over the temporary fences installed around the work to get a better photograph. Sooner or later, someone will end up climbing the branches of the cherry tree to get better detail of Banksy's stain, completely ignoring that the initial purpose of this urban guerrilla art was precisely to denounce the abandonment of the tree.
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