Narrating to know who we are. Graffiticity and travelling vision: the context of words, images and the city

Abstract

Graffiticity is a space of action in which graffiti artists esthetically take the city and transform it into an image-producing platform. The proposal of this essay is a reflection on the urban landscape as a narrative through the action of graffiti artists, contemporary agents of communication and appropriation of urban space. Said space is a territory of moving metaphors that, in its ephemeral nature, gathers points of dialectical tensions; a landscape rhymed by the interaction of the moving observer that produces glances in the urban interstices, since the observer’s body is also there wanting to interact. The bystander can perceive fragments of various cities contained in the city, where graffiti artists impose a communication that goes from the aggressiveness to the passivity of the observer and seek to create a territory of hybrid dialogues where tensions, belonging and identity converge. Thus, graffiti acquires a political-social base, generating debate between what is public and private, and questioning the proper concept of art. That foundation is composed of lines or rhizomes, without a center, where the need for identity and belonging emerges.