El Gran Mono
Established 2018 in Melbourne, Australia
White Bay Power Station
Tom Noonan
Born 1982 in Benalla (Taungurung), Australia
Lives and works in Melbourne (Wurundjeri), Australia
Johnny El P
Born 1988 in Geelong (Wathaurong), Australia
Lives and works in Melbourne (Wurundjeri), Australia
El Gran Mono, 2018
picó sound system
Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous assistance from Standish and Co by Look Print
Courtesy the artists
In the 1970s, the Carribean coastal cities of Colombia began importing vinyl records from West Africa. For the Afro- Colombian diaspora, descendants of the thousands sold into slavery in the region between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, this presented an opportunity to craft a new sonic identity. Melding Latin, salsa, Congolese rhumba, and Afropop with the feeling of a Jamaican sound-system party, a new genre of sound was born: picó.
Standing a few metres tall, hand-painted with anything from animals to revolutionary figures and lit with ultraviolet light, picó sound systems are central to the verbenas (street parties) that define the downtown streets of Barranquilla, Cartagena and Santa Marta. Replete with performances, food, dance and costume competitions, the verbenas revolve around the unique sounds and colours of picó.
Extending the transatlantic dialogue between Colombia and Africa to Australia, El Gran Mono – or ‘the Great Ape’ – is the first authentic picó to be built outside of Colombia. Painted by William Gutierrez, it depicts a giant gorilla, in a disaster movieinspired apocalyptic scene, straddling Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station. At a time when governments within Colombia are seeking to outlaw verbenas by drawing unfair parallels between picó culture and crime rates, El Gran Mono stands as a testament to the endurance of Afro-Colombian culture.
El Gran Mono is the first picó sound system built outside of Colombia. Picó are huge, hand-painted fluorescent speaker stacks, decorated with animals, aeroplanes, dragons, revolutionary figures or other psychedelic scenes. El Gran Mono (‘The Great Ape’) is a collaboration between Melbourne record collectors Tom Noonan and Johnny El Pájaro in consultation with members of the picó community in Colombia, featuring artwork by Colombian sound system artist William ‘El Maestro’ Gutierrez.
The DJs or ‘picótero’ performing on El Gran Mono play the music of Capo Verde and West Africa, The Congo, Trinidad, Haiti, and the Caribbean coast of Colombia, with styles including champeta, cumbia, zouk, soukous, rhumba, benga, and afrobeat.
Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.