This book gathers articles by professionals from various areas, interviews, reports about experiences and presentation of works by 60 nationally-representative graffiti artists. It relates the history of graffiti since its beginning, in 1980, until the present days. Sérgio Poato, editor and author, in a partnership with Maria de Lourdes Beldi de Alcântara, from the Laboratory of Imaginary and Memory of the Psychology Institute of the University of São Paulo – “LABI/USP”; publish this book, which is the component part of the collection “Imaginário” [“Imaginary”], as a means to spread and disseminate the knowledge on the Brazilian cultural diversity to the public in general. It is an important register between the graffiti and the hip hop movement in our culture.
          According to Charbelly Estrella – one of the book’s authors that holds a Master’s in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) –, the singularity of this production that has been making São Paulo the city with the highest amount of graffiti art world wide, lies in the fact that the graffiti art conjugates a different production time. This different time is the metaphor for the criticism to the indifference promoted by the shopping-mall-architecture”. This operation is only possible due to the fact that the graffiti calls for a concern about the aesthetic, poetic aspect in its production. It is in the arid and, at the same time, useful scenery that the graffiti has ventured to use new techniques, new modalities and a fervorous experimentation of its spaces, whose accesses are restricted to the everyday counter-rationalities. It’s in this scenery, which promotes the encounter between giants and “banal”.
          This is the graffiti’s daily combat – a kind of visual crusade to remember the city and its humanity. At the beginning, the graffiti art was the entertainment that challenged the public order. Graffiti painting meant to perform the juvenile irreverence in the divested leisure, in small visual disorders, in the attempt of a stroke. It was closely connected to the aggressive reaction that took over the Brazilian urban centers in the late 70’s and the beginning of the following decade of the XX century - São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília and Porto Alegre – the Punk crusade. Taking over the city, public buildings and promoting disorder. This characteristic is still strongly present in the graffiting – the venture, to venture, to scratch. Specially if we consider the urban landscape as a sign of abandonment.
          A close relationship between the graffiti and a risky experience in the city may be considered. The risk of building-climbing, the risk of law and the police repression and the risk of not lasting. The graffiti bears the risk’s emblem because it challenges the visual and formal “establishment” of the city. The population of mendicants, beggars, street dwellers, who are radically marginal, enunciates the hazards of the urban social system while they exert their most obvious and inhuman effect – the social exclusion produced by the capitalist geography of space.
          However, the drawings were little by little divesting of the juvenile ideology and structuralizing themselves under a essentially poetic concern. Graffiting stops being a revolutionary action and becomes a poetic act – producer of a visuality. This is the visual condition of the graffiti’s images itself, but, unlike the advertising, they insist on the difference, they are based on the singularity of their authors.
          If, formerly, in its common root through the “pichação” [vandal graffiti], the graffiti was, above all, the sign of insurrection, anarchy, irreverence and of little concern about the aesthetic fact, nowadays, there is a submission of this attitude of juvenile irreverence to an aesthetic and subjective concern. How? This is the answer that this essay seeks to discuss through the works of the artists Gustavo e Otávio Pandolfo – The Twin brothers, in the book under the title: “A visualidade de São Paulo e o vocabulário popular do graffiti – a poética dos Gêmeos” (“The São Paulo visuality and the graffiti’s popular vocabulary – the Twin brothers’ poetics”).
          At another moment, Sérgio Poato points to the world of “pichação” in an interview with a vandal-graffiti gang, whose vice of vandal graffiti and the risks, for them, are a means to stand out in an unequal society.
          Complementing the theme vandal-graffiti, Iracema Jandira Oliveira da Silva, Teacher and Doctorate student at the Psychoanalysis Center at PUC-SP, in her article called “Graffiti – criptografias do desejo” [Graffiti – cryptographies of desire”], relates her office experience with young transgressors, when listening to teenagers that practice vandal-graffiti on walls and public monuments in the cities. According to Iracema, those teenagers derive from what is called the culture of poverty: a low-level life quality, difficulty of access to the main benefits of the technique and technology brought by modernity; they don’t have education and professional specialization opportunities, live in very bad conditions, but they go to high-tech music parties, wish to navigate on the Internet, to have a mobile phone, after all, they know the benefits of modernity, bear its appeals, but it is a reality that, despite being quite close to their senses, is rather distant from their hands – they live the Post-modernity without having ever lived the Modernity. Those teenagers experience themselves the marks of exclusion. Their wishes inhabit the starts, but their feet tread on the open-air sewage. In the last instance, graffiting allows them to satisfy their narcissistic desires, whose essence is being unique, different, superior to the others, in order to hide an impoverished and disqualified Ego, waiting to receive in exchange, from the passersby, a look that contradicts it.
          In the chapter titled “O graffiti ocupando seus primeiros espaços” [“Graffiti taking its first spaces], Celso Gitahy presents the first artists and rebels that wrote words of order in the 60’s, 70’a and in the middle of the 80’s, in a time when there was a relationship with the time of the act of painting different from that one has today, due to the dismal period of our history marked by the dictatorship and cultural and intellectual repression, in which there was an attempt to hinder the artistic and ideological manifestations of a whole generation. The artists presented in this chapter are: Alex Vallauri, Carlos Matuck, Waldemar Zaidler, Hudnilson Jr., Vado do Cachimbo, Ozéas Duarte, Julio Barreto, Grupo Tupinãodá, Ivan Viana, Arthur Lara, Eduardo Castro, Jorge Tavares, Job Leocádio, Numa Ramos, Cláudio Donato, Carmen Akemi, Márcia Chicaoka, Neto, Mona, Juneca, Kaleb and Alexandre Orion. This latter, in an interview, explains to us the relationship between photography and painting, that characterizes his artistic work.
          The Hip Hop point in São Paulo and the graffiti drawings as the marks of the suburbs is the theme of the article written by Guilherme Scandiucci, psychologist, Master by the Psychology Institute of USP. The Hip Hop culture, which started in the New York ghettos in the 70’s, arises in São Paulo in the late 80’s. It became quite known the youngsters meetings, mainly from the suburbs, at the São Bento subway station and at Praça Roosevelt [Roosevelt Square], downtown region. The Hip Hop presents itself, in a political context, as a guiding system through which youngsters acquire “self-knowledge” in relation to the social process and promote practical interventions in the most immediate plane. The Rap arises as the main register of social “apartheid”. Inspired by a North-American cultural production, the “manos” [“bros”] of São Paulo created their own Hip Hop telling about their everyday life and problems – sometimes similar to the US black people’s. They start to see themselves as part of a common history marked by exclusions and conflicts that approximate the black-descendants from different geographic contexts to the African Diaspora. They could, thus, create the criticism to the so-called racial democracy in Brazil. In this scenery, graffiti drawings started to fill walls and stands. This variegation of lively images – often of pain and protest – gives another appearance to the suburban soul. There are various souls for this metropolis’ body, just like there are various suburbs with particular expressions. Souls that also came and come with the visual works printed by the graffiti painters.
          In the chapter “O graffiti e a dança de rua” [“The graffiti art and street dance”], one of the most eminent breakers of the movement, Marcelinho Back Spin, in an interview to Sérgio Poato, comments about the way how the Hip Hop has consolidated itself as an important language of social inclusion, transformation and mobility and that the rap, the graffiti art e the break are alternatives against marginality, mainly among the youngsters from slums. He also comments about the dance characteristics and styles, among others.
          The graffiti artists Tinho, Binho, Speto and Vitché are from a generation influenced by the Hip Hip movement, in São Paulo, in the middle of the 80’s. Today, they are part of the graffiti’s world scene, have developed their own styles and languages, and continue having a strong influence on the current generation of graffiti artists. Tinho, in the chapter “Artistas da geração Hip Hop - diferentes estilos e linguagens” [“Artists from the Hip Hop generation – different styles and languages”] tells to us part of this history, for example: artistic and personal origins, the first wall graffiti painting – the “freestyle” art, the technique, the motivation, the special works, the influence on the new generation of graffiti painters, concepts of bomb and vandal graffiti, new urban languages - stickers, “lambe-lambe”, animations, among others.
          Binho Ribeiro presents part of his works and tells to us a little bit about the graffiti expression in Brazil which, in his opinion, is the biggest artistic manifestation ever existing in the world, and the Hip Hop, as a mass culture, becomes an important political, advertising and cultural ally.
          At another moment, the artist Bonga describes his experiences as a graffiti artist and how the Hip Hop culture marked his painting style.
          Zezão, an artist with a completely different style, is discussed in the chapter called: “Subterrâneos urbanos – a visualidade visceral e delicada do graffiti de Zezão” [Urban undergrounds – the visceral and subtle visuality of the Zezão’s graffiti”], presented in this book through wonderful images and a faultless text by Charbelly Estrella. When Zezão goes down his “underground gallery”, he realizes a visceral encounter while he seeks there a more human place. Human because the sewage is equal to the city. There is no better or worse. It’s only the sewage. This cruel reduction of the place makes his artistic operation a powerful metaphor to talk about the place where the city unavoidably disembogues: into the sewage galleries. The artist’s action underground is the maximum power of an operation produced on the city walls. Our bet is that the graffiti creates visual reliefs, build artistic territories, invades disregarded surfaces, which are abandoned by the look of men who inhabit and travel through the city, that the graffiti is able to change into a new visuality. The Zezão’s drawings call the attention for the brightness, fluidity, for the subtlety of the curves. It is as if the artist recreated that space and gave the city a chance to be another thing.
          The range of styles is marked. The graffiti artist Does, from the city of Santo André, in São Paulo, started in 89 using the stencil art technique. Nowadays, he mixes aboriginal tribal techniques, Arabian calligraphies, gothic architecture, etc. In an interview for this book, carried out by Binho Ribeiro, besides the wonderful works presented, Does speaks about the meaning of Crew, respect in the graffiti culture, about the concept of art, toy, “atropelo”, “style wars”, “old school”, the graffiti scene in Brazil and worldwide, among others.
          The artist Ciro is mentioned in the article “Da transgressão perseguida à arte assentida” [“From the pursued transgression to the consented art”], written by Rolf Schunemann. Ciro, with his graffiti art, seeks to mix diverse symbols and graphies, but his biggest inspiration is in the strokes and signs of people native of the Americas. His quite particular signs mix the millennial and traditional art with expressions of the contemporary life. His art refers to situations of everyday life and the most diverse objects. His frames enhance what previously seemed to be invisible or obvious. The graffiti recovers citizenship. From a pursued and ill-reputed aesthetic expression, it becomes a consented and valued art. The graffiti, for its originality and immense creativity, makes the city less dreary and tedious.
          The multimedia and cultural activist Rui Amaral, one of the Brazilian graffiti’s exponents and that signs a 1000-square-meter panel painting on Paulista Avenue, registered by the historical patrimony of the city, presents his main urban intervention and social inclusion projects.
          The collective lambdalambs composed of Jey, Guid, Boleta, Crespo, César Profeta, Vermelho Queimado, Zeila, Berlim, Bquick, Pato and Tidi, sign a chapter about Street Art which, according to them, the paste-up, pointed as an “urban intervention” by the Brazilian art critics, is divested of commitments with any style or ideology. It is a free art which does not have the priority purpose to make itself present in museums or galleries. Its place is in the streets. The illegal street art is no longer a novelty in any big city in the world. Among the most popular means of artistic expression, the most eminent (for the mobility and easy application) are the stickers and posters. This practice arose a short time ago, but it has a prompt impact on several metropolis in all continents. Sometimes as a complement to graffiti or, in an insistent way, it has been “polluting” or imputing a message to the urban equipments, like wastebins, lampposts, telephone booths and traffic lights. For the artist Shn, the artist’s and the spectator’s intention is enough to qualify an object as art or non-art. Artistic practices can contribute to the comprehension of changes that occur in the urban space and integrate the art with the everyday life.
          Another text that brings experience accounts is the article titled “Do humor à metáfora: a trajetória do artista Patológico” (André Monteiro) [“From humor to metaphor: the course of the Pathological artist (André Monteiro)”], in which the artists seeks to show a little bit about the creation process, concept and use of colors.
          The young artists also have their space well-represented, as in the case of Mauro, a young graffiti artist from the suburbs of the South region of the capital of São Paulo, who presents a different work. Art-educator in the Grajaú district, Mauro offers painting workshops to children and teenagers who have never had any contact with art, providing them with an artistic and social development.
          Derf, a self-educated artist, has his style marked by the multiple ability to create based on letter styles and characters. His devotion and diligence to the graffiti culture has already yielded to him good outcomes, like the Hutuz Hip Hop Award within the graffiti standout category, in 2005.
          Bart and Ginho, in an interview, show the graffiti power in the countryside and the graffiti as a means of young expression.
          Many other artists present texts and works, and we can mention: Jey, Boleta, Highraff, Kboco, Chivitz, Alexandre Anjo, Graphis, Truff, Tota, Presto, Schock, Irmãos Monjon [Monjon Brothers], Feik, Falge, Foco, Celo, Felipe (ephi), Naipe, Bozer, Moai, Ricardo Reis, Akeni, Waleska, Adam Neate, Guid, Jana Joana.
          The graffiti origin in Brazil is represented by the groups “Nação” and “Fleshbeck” from Rio de Janeiro. In Belo Horizonte by the artists Dalata, Hyper and Figo. In Ceilândia, DF, by Snupi.
          The book also includes the dictionary of technical terms of the graffiti art, the trains, the productions (walls), among other subjects.


TECHNICAL DATA SHEET:
Sérgio Poato (EDITOR)
Maria de Lourdes Beldi de Alcântara (CO-EDITORA)

THE AUTHORS/COLLABORATORS
Sérgio Poato
Binho Ribeiro
Celso Gitahy
Charbelly Estrella
Guilherme Scandiucci
Iracema Jandira Oliveira da Silva
Rolf Schünemann, Tinho

TECHNICAL DATA:
Format 20 x 22 cm.
Couchê papers 150g.
208 pages.
500 images.
60 Artists

SALES:
(1) USP: Av. Prof. Lúcio Martins Rodrigues, trav. 4, block 17
Zip Code 05508-900 - São Paulo - SP
Phone:(0xx11) 3091-4386 / Fax: (0xx11) 3091-4475
E-mail: labi@usp.br
With Bia Albano
(2) Livraria Cultura [Cultura Bookstore] - Phone: (11) 3170-4033 - LIVRARIA CULTURA

CONTACT:
Sérgio Poato – (11) 3961-3533 / 9253-9719
E-mail: sergiopoato@terra.com.br