Gabriela Leal

To what interests mayors’ efforts aiming to curb and punish urban visual interventions correspond? The reflections in this article point to some directions to answer this question. From an ethnographic approach and the analysis of situations that occurred between 2016 and 2017, I describe and analyze the operations and articulations of a mayor to institute a new anti-graffiti program in the city of São Paulo, whose objective was to increase the punishments applied to those caught painting on the street. From the analysis of this case, I intend to show how this type of effort mobilizes these practices, especially graffiti and pixação, to express, by contrast, a particular paradigm of social and urban ordering. I also argue that this type of moral enterprise integrates a broader set of urban management artifacts that aim to maintain buildings and surfaces in a certain state and determine ways of being in the city.

Graffiti art and street art have been increasingly described as an artistic movement, with a constant presence in the streets, but also in galleries and museums. In this article we use the term urban art to define this institutionalized category, originating from informal street expressions. In the specific context of the city of São Paulo (Brazil), most of the social actors that make up this art world have backgrounds linked to graffiti and pixação. These two urban subcultures are linked to informal forms of appropriation of the urban space through illicit inscriptions. In this article, we aim, on the one hand, to describe the features and singularities of urban art as an emerging art world and, on the other, to understand how careers are developed in this universe. The empirical data derives from a qualitative research (in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation) developed during the past three years.

Graffiti and “pixação” are two urban expressions traditionally understood to hold a subcultural and youthful character. While graffiti is currently a culture and a global language, given its expansion over several decades, pixação remains, still, mainly limited to the Brazilian context, where it emerged. However, both graffiti and pixação have been in recent years undergoing a series of transformations that somehow accompany more global tendencies. A process of artification and institutionalisation of these aesthetic languages is underway, which gradually increases its symbolic and economic value and its social legitimation. There is, then, a double movement in progress. On the one hand, “pixadores” and graffiti writers transform the skills acquired from street painting experiences into a source of income and, eventually, a professional career; on the other hand, there is the emergence of new actors and dynamics that expand the field of possibilities. Therefore, it is possible to observe the interaction of multiple social fields that involve the street, the gallery, the museum, or the private spaces. In this chapter, we intend to discuss these issues based on a research project involving the cities of Lisbon (Portugal) and São Paulo (Brazil).

Based on an ethnography of the graffiti practices of São Paulo, held in 2016 and 2017, this article proposes a displacement of the look on this subject, to reflect on what escapes it, at first sight, that is, specific dynamics that are beyond the walls. In this perspective, we seek to describe and reflect on the effects those practices have on writers, especially about the formulation of their identities and how they interact with the urban space. This understanding allows us to highlight an elaboration of a particular way of living in the city, informed by the experiences of painting on the street.

In this ethnography, the graffiti practices of São Paulo were, at the same time, the focus of analysis and reflection and a window to think and produce knowledge about the city. The research was based on two initial objectives: to investigate the street uses of these practices and the possibilities of cities that emerge in this interaction. The fieldwork focused mainly on the street painting processes, which put the research in motion through the urban space and set up a multi-sited ethnography. In the thesis, the ethnographic data and analyzes were organized into two complementary parts. First, the trajectory of graffiti practices in the city of São Paulo leads to reflections, but without losing sight of the established relationship with other contexts, the exchanges and collaboration with other practices of street painting, the narratives that elaborate different representations of this doing and the complex interaction established with different agents and spheres of public administration. Second, from the situational analysis, three painting processes were presented as ways of reading, using, and appropriating the city, which are at the same time the condition and consequence of doing graffiti, as well as producing effects in subjects and urban spaces. From this approach, it is possible to apprehend graffiti practices as a practice that not only aesthetically modifies the surfaces but also calls into question the effectiveness of certain urban and legal postulates. This research identified a way of being and living in the city, constituted by the experiences of painting on the street, which reminds us of the condition of the possibility of making and practicing the city.

In order to comprehend what is referred to as graffiti writing in São Paulo, it was necessary to forget the walls and look at the practical dimension. This movement allowed me to identify a particular way of using the city's spaces, which encompasses different processes of doing: aesthetic, corporal, political and epistemological, which confers a tactical dimension from the point of view of time. Graffiti Beyond the Walls: Uses of the Street and Practices to Face the City seeks to reflect on these aspects from a master's research in progress, which has been investigating the uses of the street through graffiti practices in the city of Sao Paulo since 2016.