Metagraffiti
186 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
25 color and 10 B-W images
Paperback
Release Date:13 Dec 2024
ISBN:9781978834408
Hardcover
Release Date:13 Dec 2024
ISBN:9781978834415
Metagraffiti
Graffiti Art and the Urban Image in Latin America
Rutgers University Press
Metagraffiti explores how graffiti art transmits ideas about graffiti culture. These insights, in turn, inspire a deeper understanding of the social construction of cities. Focusing on graffiti scenes from São Paulo and Santiago de Chile, this innovative visual ethnography examines diverse forms of self-reference and metareference that appear in Latin American graffiti art. Chandra Morrison Ariyo works across multiple scales of contemporary graffiti production – from tags to massive murals – to show how painting the city enables individuals to reimagine their own position within the material and social structures around them. She further reveals how practitioners such as Tinho, OSGEMEOS, Grin, Bisy, and many others use metagraffiti features to influence public perceptions about this art form and its effect on the urban environment. Ultimately, Metagraffiti proposes a novel conceptual framework that highlights graffiti’s ability to forge alternative forms of movement, sociality, and value within Latin American cityscapes. These urban images invite us to imagine what the city could be, when seen as a site for action and for imagination.
Metagraffiti is beautifully written, conceptually powerful, and empirically nuanced, offering the idea of 'metagraffiti' as a frame through which to understand the many discourses about graffiti’s multiple functions, representations, and ongoing evolution in Latin America and the world. This book is an excellent resource for research and teaching around graffiti, the urban image, and forms of voicing. The specificity with which Morrison Ariyo attends to the form, process, and function of graffiti is impressive and will energize future scholarship. I highly recommend this text.
Chandra Morrison Ariyo's analysis of Latin American graffiti examines the way in which metagraffiti – what she innovatively conceives of as a graffiti about graffiti, a graffiti about graffiti as image, practice, and culture – creates both internal cohesion as much as an external awareness of the implications and potentialities of this image world in itself. Innovative and ethnographically rich, Metagraffiti is a critical contribution to the field.
CHANDRA MORRISON ARIYO is a visiting research fellow in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Chapter 1: Metagraffiti: Envisioning a Concept
Chapter 2: Urban Image: Painting (in) the Latin American City
Chapter 3: Signature Wordplay: Self-Naming, Misspelling, and Rewriting the Social Order
Chapter 4: Figurative Threat: Stigma Embodiment and Graffiti's Violent Characterization
Chapter 5: Reflective Structures: On Murals and Mirroring in the Spatial Imagination
Chapter 6: Painting Pollution: Cleaning the City and Recycling Social Values with Street Art
Chapter 7: Graffiti Intimacies: Seeing the City in Color
Chapter 2: Urban Image: Painting (in) the Latin American City
Chapter 3: Signature Wordplay: Self-Naming, Misspelling, and Rewriting the Social Order
Chapter 4: Figurative Threat: Stigma Embodiment and Graffiti's Violent Characterization
Chapter 5: Reflective Structures: On Murals and Mirroring in the Spatial Imagination
Chapter 6: Painting Pollution: Cleaning the City and Recycling Social Values with Street Art
Chapter 7: Graffiti Intimacies: Seeing the City in Color
