More Graff/Street graphics

View of Sao Paolo and Centro

Graff

There´s a unique style of lettering in Sao Paolo that I´ve never seen anywhere else. The words are coded and their meaning only known by those who know the language. This style of lettering is all over Sao Paolo, on the top of 30 story buildings and other spaces that are really difficult to get at. Im told that these tags are done with rollers and not aerosol cans and that´´s why the straight, linearity of the style.

Collectives

Daniel from Frente do Tres de Diciembre, Jen and Rodrigo from Bijari. Went to Bijari´s awesome studio in Villa Magdalena.Bijari is a collective that~s been working for 10 years. Most of them have architectural backgrounds. They do design work to pay their bills and fund their more political interventionist work. They´ve been doing a lot of work around the issue of gentrification and use a variety of strategies go engage the public in a dialogue about this issue. They are also very conscious of the distortions around such issues are disseminated through mass media, and do much work to use mass media and find ways to insert counter messages in the media.From conversations with Daniel from Frente, Geandre and Rodrigo from Bijari, artists/activists workilng in collectives and doing interventionist work in Sao Paolo is very alive and parallel to what is going on in Buenos Aires. Some other collectives to check out are The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and Contrafile

Street Graphics in SaoPaolo

Signs\flyers in Sampa 2

Sampa

Im in San Paolo. Brazil definitely ´has got some funk. The city looks lived in in a way that Buenos Aires doesn´t.Some amazing architecture. Brazilian colonial, standing next to skinny towerlike 40 story functionalist buildings next to 70~s style futuristic minimal block concrete mall structures. The first night we stayed in a funky hotel in the centro. So many people have warned us about the dangers of being a foreigner in this area at night but as far as I can see it ain´t as harsh as parts of downtown L.A. The sure don~t have the money that the Avenida Paulista has it reminds me of Broadway where the working class shops, hangs out in the day and the streets become a sort of ghosttown at night. Right next to the hotel we stayed in the first night I stumbled upon one of these dank malls filled with hip hop, reggae, skate, graffiti shops pumping out some dope music. Here´s some pics of some of the store signs. I love the black nationalist brazilian flavor.

goodbye argentina

Above,Artist Andrea Cavagnaro, was gracious enough to organize a dialogue;exchange at her apartment with me and several Portenos doing interventionist work. I showed them my own work and other work in public spaces in LA from the files I~ve gathered teaching Chicano art and popular culture: murals, graffiti, performznces, actions, interventions. It was an amazing, inspiring exchange as they bounced off the work I showed in relation to their own works and the specifics of their own, political, economic, social contexts.
The artists here are really vigilant about all aspects of art/cultural production: historiography, curation, funding, their relationship with or not with institutions. The question of working ìnside`or òutside´art institutions came up in almost every conversation. Some argued that within Argentina, there is an òutside´ space that artists have carved out in the last 10 years, and especially within the last 5 years after the crisis, in which individuals, groups have abandoneds art institutions and act outside through numerous tactics, performative acts, actions, interventions, etc. creating a vibrant space of dialogue with the larger society. Others argued that this paradigm is a false one, and there is no real inside and outside, asserting that working òutside´the art circuit does not mean the work is more or less political. Regardless, I did feel that I got a taste of an important moment in political art and street art. Some artists groups to check out: Taller Popular de Serigrafia, Etcetera, Eduardo Molinari´s Archivo Caminante, CAPATACO/Gastar, Arde Arte, GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero), and Silhuetazo. (thkanks to Jennifer Sternad Flores for some of these recommendations)