ESCRITOS EN LA CALLE
Graffiti, even the most rational ones, are always the result of a passion, an intensity that needs to be shown or told to everyone. Signed or anonymous, they represent the irrepressible wish to express and communicate oneself, many times taking the risk of being surprised in fraganti, with the paint still wet. And that adrenaline is an important element in these practices.
This book pays homage to all the people who go out writing and painting in the streets, to those who stop to watch, to those who register that casual, brief meeting with graffiti. It is an homage to all of us who live in this land sharing paths and leaving traces, and who, through graffiti, look at our cities through different eyes.
The road to this book and our interest in the topic began in 2002. First, there was a section in a digital literary magazine, Ñusléter www.niusleter.com.ar, where we published transcriptions of graffiti: phrases that readers wrote down (with the name of the street or neighborhood), and sent us by e-mail.
In 2009, that section became independent and we developed a website especially for that purpose: GRaFiTi www.escritosenlacalle.com, a collaborative platform enabling anyone to upload photos of graffiti and their location. The images in this book come from that collective archive: a selection from over 5000 pictures, sent by more than 500 people. This edition includes more than fifty professional and amateur photographers.
With the word ‘graffiti’ we mean to account for different expressions that share the fact of being painted in the streets. For the most part they are anonymous, many times made without authorization, and they include various techniques and aesthetics: writings, paintings, drawings, hip-hop, stencils, murals, street art, made with aerosol, latex, markers, stickers, glue and paper, and more. In making our selection, we paid attention to those graffiti that use the written word as a means of expression, that is, condensed forms of literature.
Like in any other topic that one investigates, there are pioneers, remote precedents and late finds, but many of the graffiti that our streets display today saw their beginnings with the return to democracy. During the early 80s, these paintings expressed relief associated with recovered liberties on the one hand, and the need to elaborate the horror and obscurity of the last dictatorship (1976-1983) on the other. Spray-paint was something new. And people could go out at night, the most propitious moment for a practice considered to be illegal. Then, graffiti were characterized by rock, counter-cultural aesthetics, critical thinking, popular humor and irony. On the walls, phrases proliferated: ideas or feelings wittily worded.
During the 90s with the globalization process, the new technologies of communication made way for more visual cultures. Also, many Argentine people traveled abroad due to the parity between the peso and the dollar, and opened the gates to new exchanges of influences. In a decade marked by design and the access to new means of production (computers, printers, the Internet), the use of stencils expanded. Graffiti inspired by writers from New York, related to the Hip Hop culture: tags, bombs and pieces, sophisticated signatures and drawings were mainly aimed at the community of those ‘in the know’. Both styles (techniques) have something in common; they are based on reiteration, on repeating the same image or calligraphy many times, in different places.
After 2000 we saw a consolidation of different currents of street art. There were murals painted with latex, or made with layers of stencils, with defined palettes and strokes and huge works crafted by means of extension sticks, scaffolds or ladders. ‘Characters’ inspired by comics, in hallucinated situations appeared. Stylistic derivations (‘post-graffiti’) arose where the border between letter and drawing becomes blurred: signatures turn into geometrical figures, abstractions or pure combinations of forms and colors. Although they are preeminently pictorial, many of these pieces also include phrases or dedications.
Beyond these trends, the painted phrase with spray or marker is constant and never loses its vigor. A basic and effective form of expression, it is very accessible, one that doesn’t require technical skill and not even correct spelling. Often there are quotes, but most of the texts remain anonymous. The words, the references and the ‘hand-writings’ change, but painted phrases maintain their capacity for moving us, stimulating imagination, broadening the senses...
Our selection privileged expressions that are most characteristic of local culture. We searched for the features of Argentine imagery and speech. We looked for signs and traces in football (soccer), in music, in politics, in native forms of expressing love, and in a wide variety of ideas and intuitions that we could call ‘thinking’.
We believe this sample is representative of what is painted in our country. It is a record of our spoken language, a linguistic archive, a collection of calligraphy, of the images, ideas and feelings that take place in our streets. It is a plural view that gathers some scattered pages of the ongoing collective book that can be read on the walls.
I hope you enjoy it.
