Disappearing Banksys: Save Them or Let Them Fade Away?
RAYMOND MCCHRYSTAL
St Leonards and Venice have something in common. Both towns are struggling with the conservation of murals that street artist Banksy has created on their walls. In Venice his mural, titled Migrant Child (2019), is painted on the wall of a building along the Rio Novo canal in the heart of Venice’s Dorsoduro district. It depicts a child holding up a flare and wearing a life vest. The Banksy mural in St Leonards was painted in 2010 onto the back of a concrete stairway leading down to the beach. It shows a small child in sunglasses building sandcastles, each labelled with the word ‘Tesco’. Because of their sites, both murals are now under threat due to environmental factors.
In May of this year, while walking along St Leonards seafront, I popped my head over the railing to look at the Banksy, and was concerned to see that the image was no longer visible. At beach level I could see that the mural had been covered with Perspex. Sea water and rainwater are now getting behind the covering and causing major problems. Some of the water is penetrating the concrete and causing a reaction resulting in staining seeping out from within the wall onto the image. Other water is condensing on the inside of the Perspex and causing the cycle to continue. The image has deteriorated and is threatened with more of the same.
In June I went to see our local councillor, Tony Collins. He was very quick to raise the matter within the relevant council departments. The response boils down to the fact that the council has neither money nor resources to deal with the situation effectively. Attempts have been made to prevent erosion by pebbles, and the Perspex is to protect it from graffiti and rain. As it is hardly visible as a Banksy anymore, the graffiti appears incognito.
Since raising my concerns in June, the council have now completely covered the mural with a sheet of plywood. This, to my mind, will only make matters worse, as sunlight cannot then drive away the moisture. I have tried to contact the Banksy Collective by sending them pictures and a description of what is going on.
At banksy.co.uk you can click ‘outside’ on the sidebar, and the St Leonards mural is the 49th image. You can also appreciate from the photograph, presumably taken by him at the moment of completion, how much it has deteriorated. I am a paper conservator by profession, so I spend my working life saving deteriorating and damaged artefacts. It concerns me to see a work like this suffering such damage and neglect.
In Venice, the moral arguments about the importance of Banksy’s work, as against his intention to place the mural in a deliberately challenging environmental position, have ended with a stalemate. Tourists’ requests for boat trips to include the Rio Novo canal prove how popular it is, yet the wake from the boats is now a major cause of its erosion. Save it, or let it fade away?
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