Abstracts
(program order)
8 July - Urban Creativity Studies
Mattia Boscaino - Developing a qualitative approach to the study of the street art world
Street art is a complex social world where a diverse set of actors contribute to determining the value of creativities. Street artists, curators, bloggers, photographers, museums, galleries, the public, and other actors interact with street artworks and influence the way they are perceived. In this multi-faceted context, it is clear that both the value and meaning of street art is not exclusively dependent on the intention of the authors but changes according to who views and uses the artwork for their purposes. Although diversity is interesting for the sake of research, finding a research methodology able to comprise the diverse perspectives briefly illustrated above, can be difficult. A multi-method qualitative study conducted between the 2017 and 2019, attempted to include many aspects of the social structure of street art in order to understand how street artworks transform from unknown to renowned in the digital era. The study proved to be useful to cover many of the various perspectives of some of the actors mentioned above. Indeed, data collection consisted in conducting semi-structured interviews as well as analysing digital conversations where street artworks were interaction happened within either specialised or non-specialised audiences. Semistructured interviews were conducted with street artists, street art curators and street art connoisseurs - bloggers, administrators of digital platforms, photographers, etcetera - while digital conversations were considered in order to grasp the significance of the interactions happening between the street artwork and its audience(s), amongst street artists, and within the digital audience. Analysing the data via thematic analysis revealed a multi-dimensional structure of the street artworld, and allowed an understanding of how street artworks become renowned in the digital era. This methodological approach allowed including different professional and personal perspectives, as well as integrating the personal accounts with the observation of in situ interactions.
Gabriela Leal - Street Epistemologies
This research journey started at the street, among drops of latex paint and spray cans, in São Paulo, 2016. The ethnography developed at that time, during my master's research, allowed me to access and describe some particularities of an urban practice - graffiti writing - as well as it also revealed a São Paulo that I did not know until then. At the same time that I could identify in this practice particulars ways of using, reading, and appropriating the city; those same ways of relating to the urban space taught me things through specific knowledge. Some years later, I approached pixação through new research projects, which allowed me to confirm some research topics that accompanied me since I started thinking about cities' issues with graffiti-writers. Graffiti and pixação are ways of thinking invested in ways of acting, which through the specific use of urban space, leave marks that modify it aesthetically and symbolically. This city's experience produces effects on writers and pixadores, whose ways of being and thinking are forged in this using and painting the street. It is possible to identify a poetic in there, that is, a way of getting to know the world and reinventing it, which, in the particular context of São Paulo, concerns experiences that start on the margins and edges of the city. Through the rolês (getting up) - that implies an intense and extensive circulation on the urban fabric
- writers and pixadores develop a particular way of organizing what is perceived in the city, which, in turn, reveals a specific knowledge regime about the urban space. It is about the production of this knowledge, this street epistemologies, genuinely urban, that I intend to reflect on.
Lachlan MacDowall
Flash Forward Melbourne - 40 acts / 40 artists / 40 laneways / All new work / All free / Melbourne 2021.
Carlos Mare – About NYU , Hip Hop Education Center
The Hip-Hop Education Center (HHEC) cultivates and develops Hip-Hop scholars, teaching artists, activists, and social entrepreneurs in the effort to professionalize the field of Hip-Hop Education and inform the larger education sector. It achieves this through qualitative and quantitative research, program evaluation, community outreach and programming, teacher training and placement, policy development, advocacy, archiving, and social enterprising.
Clara Sarmento - The Project StreetArtCEI
In contemporary urban Northern Portugal, cultural tourism is a primary factor of socio-economic empowerment, decentralization and development, provided it does not become another factor of gentrification and social segregation, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed the seemingly unstoppable boom in tourism. Aware of these challenges, the Center for Intercultural Studies continues to develop the project StreetArtCEI – Routes of Graffiti & Street Art in Porto and Northern Portugal, a territory with a rich variety of distinct urban narratives.
StreetArtCEI blurs the frontiers between dominant and marginal cultures, their practices, symbols and aesthetic manifestations, as projections of the communities’ feelings and concerns. The polysemic visual narratives of graffiti and street art generate and display valuable information on the citizen’s understanding of their built environment.
StreetArtCEI works with artists, local municipalities and communities, to research under a critical standpoint the experience of the urban territory. The project website is an open-access tool that provides more than 3000 images collected up to now, 12 geographical routes and 12 author’s routes, with 500 POIs - Points Of Interest, archives and critical texts. More geographical, author and thematic routes are constantly being produced, alongside actions for entrepreneurship in cultural tourism, and 2 spin-off projects, one on routes of Street Music and another on “Street Art against Covid”, which tries to contribute to the economic recovery of the city. The project has also been working with local municipalities, producing tailor-made routes of graffiti and street art, as well as routes of literature, architecture, heritage, fine arts, gastronomy, and festivals, among others.
Vasco Rodrigues - I wanna be Adored - the evolution of street art in Lisbon
My paper will focus on the evolution of street art in Lisbon since its inception in the late 80's until present day, describing its interaction with public space, reaction from public and private organizations, reaction from the main public and shift in the mentality of both players and the general public, based on personal knowledge and interaction within the street art world.
It will focus on the reasons why graffiti started, became both famous and infamous, shifted towards the designation of street ART and became a worldwide phenomenon, spreading Lisbon's name and trademark as a major player throughout the globe.
It will also focus on the shift of a paradigm between wanting to be famous yet anonymous to the general public in face of the teachings of hip-hop culture, opposed to the glorification, both in the perception of others and financialy, of being a worldwide known artist.
It will also analyse the different shifts of perception from the inhabitants of Lisbon and how it also changed the rise and fall of street art within the city, as well as copy cat phenomena from other municipalities and agents.
Ana Luísa Castro, Ana Gariso - Lisbon vs Porto: Contrasts in urban art public management
Laura Rodrigo, Adris Fernández, Carmen Ruiz - Comparative analysis of urban art cataloguing projects in the cities of Monterrey (Mexico) and Jaén (Spain)
In the last months of 2020 and the first half of 2021, two urban art cataloguing projects have been carried out in two cities in different countries, which have made it possible to put into practice methodological proposals that until now had remained mainly at a theoretical level. This is the project "Painted on the wall. Study of wall painting in the province of Jaén in the XX-XXI centuries'', financed by the Instituto de Estudios Giennenses (Diputación de Jaén, Spain) and the project "The muralist creation of the CALLEGENERA Urban Expressions Festival as cultural artistic consumption" in the city of Monterrey, financed by the Mexican Programme for the Promotion of Cultural Projects and Co-investments. In these projects, methodological systems for working and collecting information, cataloguing sheets and models for interviewing different artists have been developed, with a common theoretical basis, such as the proposals that emerged within the (GE-IIC (Grupo Español de Conservación of International Institute for Conservation of Historic and artistic works) Urban and Public Art Group and taking into account the proposals of the CAPuS project and YOCOCU. For this reason, this paper analyses both projects in terms of their methods and results, and draws conclusions about which options have worked best with a view to optimising resources for future projects. A proposal is also made to improve the catalogue sheets on urban art by including information on the correlation between the work and the communities surrounding it, since urban art only makes sense in its context, and some of this information is lost when the sheets are made. Furthermore, with a view to possible actions for the preservation of the works, the relationship of the communities in which they are integrated with them is fundamental.
Enrico Bonadio - Litigating Copyright in Street Art: The Latest Developments from France and Italy
The talk will cover two recent cases of copyright in street art litigated in Italy and France.
The first legal action has been brought in 2021 by the Rome-based artist Alessia Brabow against the Vatican City before the Court of Rome. The latter had used a wheatpaste created by the former (and placed on a wall in Rome) to design a new stamp which was then sold to the public, in particular collectors. The artist claimed that the Vatican had infringed her economic rights as well as her moral right of integrity. The case is currently pending. The talk will expand on the claims put forward by the artist and the defences which the Vatican could raise.
The second case involved the Paris-based wheatpaste artist COMBO, who is known for creating and placing subversive pieces across France as well as studio artworks. In March 2016 COMBO placed a large wheatpaste on the wall of the Gustave Flaubert College depicting a representation of Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic. By taking an image which evokes the French Revolution, he was able to hijack the message for his own purpose. COMBO’s Marianne indeed represented a young woman with a bare right breast, carrying the tricolour flag on her left shoulder, accompanied by the caption “We want justice”.
To the disdain of COMBO, one of his Marianne wheatpaste appeared in several videos promoting the 2017 presidential race of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French left politician who is currently leader of La France Insoumise ‘Rebellious France’ and a member of the National Assembly. The artist responded stating that “since Jean-Luc has used my work without asking me, I contacted his team via my lawyer to ask them to remove my fresco from their clips”. As this did not happen, COMBO had to start a legal action before the Court of Paris, and the final decision by the court was released in January 2021. The artist lost the case, though. The talk will expand on the reason why his action failed.
Emma Marie L Love - Through the Modern Graffiti Photographers Lense
Through the Modern Graffiti Photographers Lense The new narrative emerging of the modern graffiti documenter is very different from the past. An honest review of why it's important to remember how and why graffiti documenting began so it can continue for the future protection of the culture.
Lorenzo Stefano Iannizzotto, Rafael Sousa Santos - Photography as an instrument to approach Residual Spaces on the Peri-urban Fringe
Lorenzo Stefano Iannizzotto (1994) completed a master’s degree in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence in 2021 with the thesis “Construir entre: Inhabiting the residual spaces on the Lisbon hillside”, with the maximum grade of 110/110 com laude and publication recommended. He was also an erasmus student at BME, Budapest University of Technology and Economics (2017), and at ISCTE, University institute of Lisbon (2018). In 2018 he worked as an intern architect at Ventura Trindade Arquitectos, in Lisbon. In 2016 he won a photography competition at the University of Florence. In 2021 he won an honorable mention in the contest organized by University of Florence Un-locking cities. Nuovi scenari per l’abitare, he took part of a university subject called Fotografia come indagine urbana, about relation between photography and urban studies and he participated in the international conference Grand Projects - Urban Legacies of the late 20th Century, organized by Iscte university of Lisbon. Since 2021, he has worked as an intern architect at Ventura Trindade Arquitectos, in Lisbon.
Rafael Sousa Santos (1991) completed a master’s degree in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) in 2016 with the thesis “Life and movement: Hypothesis of urban regeneration about Porto's Estrada da Circunvalação”. During his master’s, he participated as an intern at the Centre for Studies of the Faculty of Architecture (CEFA-UP) on the development of the Belmonte Revitalization Project (between 2014 and 2015). In 2017 he worked as an intern architect at Contemporânea | Manuel Graça Dias + Egas José Vieira, in Lisbon. Currently he is a PhD student in Architecture at FAUP, with supervisors from FAUP, Politecnico di Milano and Aahrus University, developing a research about the forms of representation and its role in architectural design teaching (since 2017). He also collaborated in the curricular units of Economia Urbana and Urbanística 2 of Integrated Master’s in Architecture (MIARQ) at FAUP (between 2017 and 2020).
Marianne Geraldine Walker -Reclaiming the city through urban art: An exploration of activism in Birmingham and Barcelona.
Through in-depth interviews with urban artists, this paper seeks to further build on the understanding of urban art as an activist tool. The study aims to shed new light on the reality of urban art activism, assessing how its ability to act as a form of resistance has changed in a world where urban art is becoming increasingly monetized and appropriated by private entities. Focusing on both Birmingham and Barcelona, the paper addresses how activist artists manage this new reality and explores whether urban art is still a tool to reclaim the city.
Barbara Priolo - Public art in Riace: challenging capitalism to recapitalize the intercultural community.
Emilia Jeziorowska - Conventionality and innovation. Détournement in 2011-2012 protest art
Andrea Baldini - Street Art, Graffiti, and the Politics of Improvisation
When creating their works, in effect, street artists never bring to light something that has been fully planned in advance. The street, in effect, is a context in constant evolution: The train is moving, a passerby is approaching, or it has started raining. Under risky and uncertain circumstances, street artists are bound to take some artistically salient decisions on the spot. This condition of forced spontaneity is the primary source of those endless aesthetic variations that even similar works of street art show. But there is something more: For the peculiar social norms regulating visibility in modern cities, as we shall see, the spontaneity of street art also carries political significance. In the context of urban aesthetics, the right to improvise becomes then object of power struggles. I call that phenomenon the politics of improvisation.
While aestheticians have discussed at length the role of improvisation in the musical arts, other art kinds just like street art have been largely ignored. Moreover, in the literature, much emphasis has been placed on clarifying the aesthetic and ethical import of improvisation, but little effort has been made in examining its political implications. In this presentaion, I set forth to explore the heretofore overlooked connection between improvisation and street art. I argue that street art’s improvisational nature is grounded on its spontaneous uses of public spaces.
As a consequence of their spontaneity, works of street art are rough and unpolished, thus realizing a distinct aesthetics of imperfection. Such an aesthetics significantly contrasts with the authoritarian perfectionism that dominates the appearances of our cities, whose landscapes are tightly controlled and carefully planned by the authorities. Such a challenge illuminates, within the context of the politics of improvisation, the extra-aesthetic significance of street art’s spontaneity: By encouraging free expression, street art does not simply have the potential to enrich the aesthetics of our cities, but also to create suitable conditions for more satisfactory and joyful social lives.
Mattia Ronconi, Jorge Manuel Lopes Brandão Pereira, Paula Cristina Almeida Tavares - Representation and Reconstruction of Memories and Visual Subculture
Laima Nomeikaite - Street art, heritage and everyday improvisation
Traditionally, heritage research has emphasized problem solving and object-led scientific thinking – that is, thinking that is kind of detached from the researcher’s everyday life. In contrast, this paper calls for the improvisational approach of non- representational theory to be applied within street art and heritage research. Non- representational theory renders the liveliness of everyday improvisational performance and the temporary, affective, spontaneous, and relational aspects of the world and the academic work. In my empirical investigation, improvisation occurred through my random and spontaneous conversations with the visual artist Munch Malo and the ‘Hotel Havana’ urban space in Oslo, Norway. Drawing on non-representational theory – and the messiness of improvisational everyday practice – the research decodes my experiences with Munch Malo and the urban space, which led me to better understand not only Munch Malo’s artistic practices, but also movement, change, affective atmospheres, materiality and encounters, more generally. Furthermore, situated in my own experience of the urban space, this research article illustrates that improvisational everyday practice can, in itself, function as a performative method as it can engender creativity, experimentation and new theoretical and practical knowledge about mundane life. The purpose of this article is two-fold: first, to illustrate the spontaneous and creative nature of heritage research and second, to highlight the improvisational everyday practice as a performative urban heritage methodology. Underpinning the performative heritage methodology is the idea that everyday improvisational practices may generate a stronger understanding of street art, urban cultures and the social world.
Jacob Kimvall - Highway Resurrected?
The in the Stockholm-region famous graffiti-mural ’Highway’ (1989) by SHOF was partly destroyed in an anti-graffiti effort during the summer of 2019, only weeks before its 30s birthday. The destruction led to an unsanctioned and populous restoration attempt by locals and members. This paper discuss the unusual popularity of this mural, and look at the different stakeholders in the process of the possible preservation of the mural, including an auto ethnographic reflection of the authors own role, who have followed this piece since its creation in 1989. The purpose is to use the example of ’Highway’ as a case-study of the current musealisation and heritagisation of graffiti and street art. The results indicate an historical process where graffiti-murals have went from hypothetical, over theoretical to factual – if still also precarious – cultural heritage.
Isabel Carrasco - Diving into a street art intervention from 1979
Jaume Gomez Muñoz - Nasty Stuff: Research interviews and graffiti archive by Craig Castleman 1978. Research by INDAGUE and Contorno Urbano
INDAGUE Association for the Research and Dissemination of Graffiti and Urban Art together with Fundacion Contorno Urbano and Craig Castleman will publish in the coming months the unpublished work Nasty Stuff (Craig Castleman, 1978)
Nasty Stuff was Craig Castleman's first academic research paper. An academic project started with his students from the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, where he was a professor in the English department until the spring of 1978. This research work was later transformed into a brilliant PhD defended at Columbia University by the prestigious anthropologist Margaret Mead.
The results of this Doctoral Thesis were published in 1981 under the title "Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York" by the publisher M.I.T. Press, a book that translated into numerous languages such as Spanish had a decisive impact on the graffiti diaspora and on the maturation of numerous old school graffiti scenes in Europe and South America.
The documentary value of Nasty Stuff lies in its numerous unpublished interviews giving voice to: the staff of the Transit Police Department, central characters in the expansion of the Hip-Hop concept such as Fab5 Freddy and writers such as Jae 5, Adom 2, Daze, Slick , Son1, Carmen, Keno & Chino, Bama, Mitch, Rat & Candy, Wicked Gary and Lee Quiñones.
Nasty Stuff also delves into the photographic archive of Craig Castleman, publishing for the first time numerous photographs taken from 1978 to 1985 that illustrate the evolution and maturation of the graffiti scene in New York.
Nasty Stuff is configured as well as the continuation of the Castleman Tour 2019 Project and the book “Getting Up: 40 years later” published for the occasion. Both projects coordinated by INDAGUE and Fundación Contorno Urbano have the mission to create a documentary archive of public access in the coming years.
9 July - Urban User Experience
Alejandra Isabel Taylhardat, Marie Martins, Marla Dias, José Miguel Abreu - Transhuman Simulation
As a problem statement for our Interaction Design project, we consider focusing on the area of Post-Humanism, specifically tackling the anticipatory vision of how the creation of a "new body" can be for human beings in the days to come, betting on improvements of the human condition, associating ideas like longer life span, immortality and the objectification of the body.
As our goal for this project, we present the benefits as well as the disadvantages in a nuanced way. We try to show a certain awareness in the ethical sense of the philosophy of human life, creating a kind of ironic remark of this utopia that is unreachable. There is indeed a rupture from the humanist human to one that is posthumanist, in which technology becomes the focus for our development. This new idea that the human being is not at the center of the universe, that he himself is interconnected with the environment as well as things. Moreover, the idea of the objectification of the body, being able to show the countless possibilities of what a body is and how it could be changed.
The project is developed in a digital platform focused on a virtual-visual experience and of irony and self-awareness, that lets the user reflect upon the theme. Thus, a kind of personalization platform and the issues that arise in the creation of bodies to be inhabited was developed in two stages: in a first stage, physical creation, within new emerging technologies. In a second phase, of mind uploading, where memories and consciousness will be uploaded into the body so that the user can inhabit it. For all of this it was necessary to do research and a pre-study on the possible users, through a questionnaire made for them.
Inês Vargas Frazão, Maria Horta, Catarina Landim, Ema Caetano - Potential Social and Economic Repercussions of The Transhumanist Revolution
Our project consists of a visual novel game called Not Today, centered around the topic of transhumanism and its possible repercussions in our society.
Transhumanism is a cultural and intellectual movement that advocates the creation of mechanisms to enhance various parameters of human life and revolutionise the notion of what it means to be human. It presents very attractive solutions, a long and promising future for mankind, and the potential achievement of the dream of eternal life. However, from a social and ethical point of view, we encounter many obstacles to the soundness of the proposed solutions.
Through our project, we managed to create an interactive experience that aims to expose a utopian scenario in which our society was divided into two distinct factions: the transhumans (the rich and powerful) and the humans (the lowlifes). This split in society occurred with the arrival of the transhumanist revolution, which widened the already existing social inequalities.
Not Today takes the player on a journey into this new society, through the eyes of a member of the poor class that decides to rebel against the system. During his cross-country journey to seek freedom, the player will learn more about transhumanism and its possible harmful effects and will go through various challenges, gradually getting to know this society in depth.
The ultimate goal is above all to surprise the players and take them through an immersive experience to get to know the darker side of this movement, to foster debate on the subject and generate more sensitivity to the issue.
Duarte Costa, Francisco Janes, Maria Proença, Rodrigo Amâncio - ATMA, Interfacing with the brain
Catarina Diniz, Cláudia Gomes, Sara Encarnação, Vadym Skaskiv - Aeon: An Interactive Experience on Virtual Immortality and the Potencial Consequences of Data Surveillance
This project consists of an interactive experience, concentrated in a website, that serves the purpose of provoking a critical reflection on the subjects of Virtual Immortality, Data Surveillance and the amount of personal information that we disclose online, specially to big companies such as Google and Facebook. The critical reflection and ethical debate that the project aimed to raise were made possible through the formulation of a futuristic scenario, that is fictional yet quite realistic, considering the advances on technology that might soon allow Virtual Immortality to be a reality. This futuristic scenario is provided by Aeon, the center figure of the project and main object of its development. Aeon is the name of a (fictional) company that sells Virtual Immortality through the creation of a personal Avatar that is generated based on the digital footprint of the interested person. This Avatar is activated upon the death of the person in question and that Avatar proceeds to exist on the “Virtual Space” also managed and made available by the company. This process is simulated in the interactive experience, to exemplify how one company can extract all the data that exists concerning the user as soon as the user accepts certain terms & conditions and privacy policies. While the main goal is to try to make the users question themselves about the quantity and quality of information that they disclose online, there are also questions that can be formulated in this experience about consciousness and moral values related to Virtual Immortality. Nevertheless, these questions and critical reflection is mostly dependent on the users and their own opinion on the matter.
Bruno Miguel Silva, Helena Maria dos Anjos, Pedro Diogo Tavares, Lola Manuela Meintjes - Globule: Control data in order to manipulate the algorithm.
When people are connected to the internet, their personal data is being shared with companies that use it for their own benefit, almost as a factory farm for human beings. Hence, by tracking and profiling everyone, those companies make profits by manipulating our behaviour. In fact, they are not trying to sell their products; each one of the internet users becomes “the product.”
In addition, there is the “filter bubble”, a term that refers to the results of the algorithm that constrains what one finds online, creating a unique universe of information for each of the users, altering the search results.
Globule is a free software that allows the users to scan all the information available about themselves across the internet, listing the data shared and creating new profiles of data to manipulate the algorithm and increase the level of control of internet search results. It offers a complete customization of the alternative profiles, creating a random profile.
Thus, this app interferes with the algorithm used to collect information, according with the user’s profile: controls the search results, preventing the filters and reducing restriction, debugging and redirecting them, to provide access to others; to boycott, deceive and confuse the system, or those using the data collected, in order to avoid any kind of harassment; or to protect the privacy users by managing the data that becomes available online.
Eduardo Féteira, Raquel Gomes, Mafalda Rodrigues, Matilde Fernandes - The Playground - the future of platform capitalism
The Playground is a project addressing the monetization of social media and the way in which these platforms use collected data to develop a selection process that studies and conditions its interviewees through technology to achieve its own independent gains. The dystopic scenario takes place 5 years in the future when, after decades of data mining the most personal information about the lives of its users, the big tech companies united to create a new and exclusive social network platform called PLAYGROUND, that offers close contact and relationship building with higher status and income individuals. This alliance between Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon and Paypal becomes a self-feeding system that uses the individual databases of each older platforms to develop a multiple functionality and streamlined services platform. This platform selects its users through an invite and interview-only process. The reason for this system is to ensure the approval of members that are active on the platform for which they will be compensated for according to their levels of engagement and quality of produced content. The critical moment will be the interview, conducted by an AI which will evaluate how much each candidate is worth to the platform – and to the exploitative goals of the AI and its parent companies. This AI is called MINDER. The appeal of this platform is its exclusivity, the closeness and networking opportunities it provides to people of similar or higher social status and its social currency. This platform thus becomes a trap for the collection and commercialization of further data, through the control and enhancement of user interaction through its patented technology, under the guise of an exclusive content-sharing platform, very similar to the way we currently interact with our devices and web platforms.
Gustavo Mello Castro - Tod. An AI braille translator for visualy impaired people
Ana Henriques, Victor M Almeida, José Gomes Pinto - The problem with gender-blind UX
Gender-blind UX design hinges upon an assumption that designing equally is the same as designing for equality. That, however, is inaccurate, as gender-blindness is merely a synonym for neutrality. Neutrality, because it lacks a concerted effort to subvert, favors hegemonic values and epistemologies, which counters the purported aim of equality. Supposedly objective methods of analysis, such as data gathering and interpreting, are not deprived of this hegemonic bias either. As such, through an acknowledgment of ethics, the designer must recognize that they are, indeed, imbuing their values into their designs, which bears influence on the ways in which the user interacts and interprets those designs, a notion which is especially relevant to a field concerned with user experience. This may be done deliberately or by accident, but it is always inevitable. Ethics is, in this way, inextricable from the design process, and, thus, the present article aims to propose that designing for equality requires the designer to act as an ethical agent — responsibly, consciously and knowingly — especially if one hopes to avoid a design which embodies and communicates oppressive notions. In particular, within the purview of ethics and with resort to some case studies and examples, it argues that designing towards gender equality requires not a gender-blind design process, but rather one which is specifically gender-conscious. Further, this article also offers some suggestions as to how we might begin to act as ethical design agents and implement marginalized epistemologies into the design process.
Mariana Ramos - Interaction design in museological activity, include or exclude
Jon Yablonski – author of the book - Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services (Detroit, USA)
Hollander, Justin - Biometrics and the Public Realm: Urban Design and Planning During the COVID Pandemic
10 July - Practise driven approaches
Bjorn Van Poucke – Street Art Today 2 The 50 most influential street artists today (book)
Going beyond the cliché of street art as artistically responsible graffiti, this Who's Who of the international contemporary street art scene features 50 of the top street artists working today, complete with exclusive interviews. More than a revised edition of Street Art Today (2015), this book offers a completely new and updated roster of artists, and highlights the evolution of street art in all its multi-faceted complexity. Street Art Today is beautifully presented and written, in the main, in straightforward language accessible to all.
Martyn Reed, Susan Hansen - Nuart Journal “Lockdown/Reconnect”
The articles in Nuart Journal’s LOCKDOWN issue illustrate the productivity of the unexpected creative alliances we have forged in the face of this particular moment in our collective history.
Jaume Gomez Muñoz - Strictly Toyz Magazine 3: documenting toy and bad graffiti (book)
Strictly Toyz is the only regular print magazine that focuses on toy graffiti culture, citizens writing and bad urban poetry. Edited by the Academic of graffiti Jaume Gómez, Strictly Toyz publishes its third issue in a context that has redefined culture on a global level.
This time he does it in double format with 180 full color pages of communicative garbage a great synonymous with humanity. At Strictly Toyz we understand that for mainstream society and the graffiti subculture, graphic garbage establishes the margin between the visually acceptable and the unworkable, between what remains inside and what remains outside graffiti subculture. But, without its existence it would be impossible to establish its own limits.
In this third edition we have decided to strongly cover the phenomenon of poetry and urban writing that is combined with toy graffiti and graphic experimentation to shape a more extensive edition. More than 294 shots of creations that possess the iconic magic that we have been documenting these years: inscriptions, insults, adolescent writing in which we detect a great participatory growth of women, writing from outsiders, sexual offers, figuration of all kinds and infra-graffiti (even suburban) that stands out for its particular execution materials, its forms and strokes, their colors, their references or their particular inscription in the context.
From Catalonia, Philosophia Callejera has provided us with endless photographs focused especially on surreal writing executed by all kinds of citizens. From Madrid, our great collaborator E-1000 has once again surprised us with his powerful infra-graffiti photographs that emerged in mostly rural contexts. From Valencia, Lucas Sanchis has also offered us a good assortment of toy graffiti mostly executed within the city. In addition, the photographic fund of Strictly Toyz has provided the rest of the materials, especially deepening infra-graffiti and surreal writing.
In short, a large compilation of writing and graffiti waste that a contains great communicative and aesthetic power due to its despicable and disgusting peculiarities.
Jo Preußler - Graffitimuseum project
Graffitimuseum is a project by Jo Preußler, Aljoscha Greich and Stefan Reuter. Since 2001, the group has appeared in city walks, happenings and discussion events, in theater and performance projects, exhibitions and in games in urban space.
Graffitimuseum is an artist collective from Germany. They are doing performances, lectures and installations.
Rafael Sousa Santos - Simple impressions of a linear territory
The modern belief in rationality and technical-scientific knowledge as the main references for the recognition and management of the territory, led to the simplification of the urban reality to a universalizing entity, reducible to simple schemes and taxonomies [1]. As referred by Lamas [2] the disciplinary abstraction assumed in traditional reading processes does not allow to fully explain the urban object, either in its configuration or in its formation process. Thus, the “passive” analysis needs to be complemented with in loco assessment, through the cross-reading between the erudition of scientific knowledge and the impressive approach. Instinctive or emotional perception seems to be the key means to apprehend the particularities that constitute the identity and values of territories and societies - assuming, as argued by Lynch, that perception is an eminently creative act [3]. It is therefore essential to experience the everyday life, to take the position of the observer, not only through physical presence, but also, and above all, through movement [4]. With this article it is intended to present the results of an impressive approach to a linear territory, taking as a case study the Estrada da Circunvalação of Porto. With reference to the work developed by Gianfranco Rosi in Sacro Gra (2013), the process of recognizing the case study was conducted over several days, in order to record the relationship between the configuration of spaces and ways of living. Photography and written notes were the types of record used during the observation periods. The field material was later transformed into a narrative sequence, taking on the character of a travel diary.
Stephen Pritchard - Conversations On Walls
Ana Cristina García-Luna Romero, Javier Alberto Flores Leal - Monterrey, city of urban expressions
In the XXI century, the cultural sphere of urban expressions are a reflection of the perception of life in the city, of the routines and figurations that tend to relate to the urban environment and that come to shake or shape the conditions of urban life . The CALLEGENERA Festival of Urban Expressions marks a drastic change within urban artistic movements and offers recognition to urban expressions in the state of Nuevo León, México. In this way, Callegenera consolidates itself as one of the most influential art forums and urban manifestations in the state and the country. In this way, the festival alludes to the heritage that persists, and that most of the time is hidden from the elite culture, due to its connection with prejudices about contemporary methods of urban expression. Since its inception, the festival was mobilized to bring together the various urban expressions that exist in the city in a single space, where the production of new talents and the exchange between them can coexist. The intention of this festival is that citizens recognize the streets in a different way, the spaces and their aesthetics, managing to change their gaze to value all urban expressions as part of their own culture. The research group seeks to disseminate the ten-year history of the festival by documenting the works of their previous editions that have been built within the urban environment and how these works of arts had influenced the citizens by their presence in the metropolitan context, and also demonstrating the impact generated by the festival on issues of revaluation of street art within the city.
Sandi Abram - Ljubljana Street Art Festival
Ljubljana Street Art Festival is the first international contemporary street art festival in Slovenia. Launched in 2019 and born from a passion for urban art, the festival is envisioned as an annual event that brings together the global street art community by inviting international and local artists and scholars in collaboration with interested cultural organizations and the public. It also invites visitors to read the streets and participate in activities, as well as showcases young, emerging generations of street artists to ensure a bright future for one of the most important art movements of the 21st century.
Luca Borriello – talk about - Inopinatum Centro Studi sulla Creatività Urbana
INOPINATUM Study Center on Urban Creativity was created by INWARD, an Italian nationwide organization active in valorizing Urban Creativity (graffiti writing, murales, street art, urban design), with the Department of Communication and Social Research of Sapienza University in Rome in 2009, and from 2010 is realizing national and international events to promote a more conscious knowledge of Urban Creativity.
Lori Goldstein - Manager of WESTAF’s Public Art Archive.
WESTAF (Western States Arts Federation) is a regional nonprofit arts service organization dedicated to strengthening the financial, organizational, and policy infrastructure of the arts in the West. WESTAF assists state arts agencies, arts organizations, and artists in their quest to serve diverse audiences, enrich the lives of local communities, and provide access to the arts and arts education for all. Through innovative programming, advocacy, research, technology, and grantmaking, WESTAF encourages the creative advancement and preservation of the arts regionally and through a national network of customers and alliances.
PAA is a free, continually growing, online and mobile database of completed public artworks. By uniting records from public art organizations and artists into one comprehensive resource, the Archive aims to raise awareness about the value of public art and help make it possible for stakeholders to advance the professionalism of public artists and practitioners in allied fields. Since the Archive’s inception in 2010, public art organizations and artists have submitted informational text, images, and additional multimedia files describing completed public artworks at no cost.
Anna Rodrigues - Challenging Media (Mis)Representations of Indigenous Women and Girls through Public Art Interventions
A number of public art interventions that I have photographed, such as murals and street art, have been created by artists who are women and identify as Indigenous. When analyzing those images, I have identified narratives of empowerment, resilience and agency which contrast sharply with past and contemporary (mis) representations of Indigenous women and girls found in Canadian mass media. For example, a common narrative found in popular culture and media stories include Indigenous women and girls being defined through victimhood (Longstaffe, 2017). Other negative representations include being incompetent mothers, individuals without agency and having drug and/or alcohol addictions (Jiwani and Young, 2006). Employing critical visual analysis, this presentation will look at public art interventions that counteract misrepresentations of Indigenous women and girls in mass media in Canada. In addition, it will discuss the ways in which these pieces function as a form of public pedagogy by educating people who encounter these works on Indigenous culture and traditions.
Helena Maria Silva Santana, Maria Rosário da Silva Santana - How street art can honor culture and their artists
Throughout the ages, street art has surprised us, and more and more, with proposals for works of undeniable aesthetic and artistic value. Proposed in open spaces, these works contemplate various forms and intentions. In one of its aspects, they aim to pay homage to culture and those who survive, promoting different ways of looking at man, life, and art. In making street art alert, drawing attention to various themes, some unexpected, the themes it uses emerge from life and places. These artistic manifestations propose a new look at art and spaces in the city. Integrating into the spaces, rehabilitating people, buildings, places, the elements that emerge from it make the places where they settle, places of search and enjoyment.
In this context, we have witnessed the proliferation of works of art that pay homage to the culture and artists of the city. By identifying and analysing some of these elements, and examining their work proposals, we intend to discuss the way their authors shape them, alerting not only to facts and themes, but also to issues of a social, moral and environmental nature.
In this paper, we intend to show how urban art pays homage to Portuguese culture and artists, namely those of fado's intangible heritage of humanity, referring to their representation in city spaces, namely Lisbon. Likewise, we want to show how these events serve for the rehabilitation of spaces and as interventions at the social and community level, bringing culture to everyone (spaces and people), promoting their search and enjoyment. In another, we show how its realization, dignifies an art form that in its origin was considered an alternative and minor.
Ilaria Lombardo - Graffiti in the Dheisheh refugee camp
My purpose is to demonstrate that visual art plays an actively productive role in the spatial formation of the Palestinian refugee camp. Specifically, I focus on the role of graffiti in the Dheisheh camp (Bethlehem, West Bank). The exceptionality of this camp arises from its particular social and spatial asset: as with many heterotopias, it is neither private nor public; it is in a legal and spatial limbo where durable forms of ‘commonality’ take place. I analyse the production of graffiti in Dheisheh as being embedded in the ‘common’ space of the camp that, I claim, generates and is generated by graffiti.
By analysing some of the graffiti that I photographed in the Dheisheh camp, I demonstrate how they contribute to the formation of a community that shares common counter-narratives. The walls of the camp are a space of social and political expression, open to everyone. Additionally, I argue that the temporary essence of the graffiti form is linked to the precariousness of the refugees’ experience: the camp is a temporary solution and its walls do not belong to anyone. Thus, graffiti are not understood as permanent pieces of art, as often happens in Western contexts.
I understand the refugees’ claim for temporariness – linked to the right of return – as being related to the refusal of ‘museumisation’ that needs to be seen more widely as a claim against the culture of the museum as a place of representation of the Other, as a space for imposing a narration and erasing minor histories and narratives. By insisting on the relations between aesthetics and politics in non-Western contexts – from a postcolonial, decolonial and subaltern perspective – I read the politics of refugee artistic production as a truly radical culture that eludes and deconstructs the subjugating mechanisms of (neo)colonial and global power.
Vittorio Parisi - The Weird and the Urban
Kristin Lee Moss - The Power of Painting and Paste-Ups
This work examines the contemporary global phenomenon of street art. Using a visual culture studies approach, this research critically analyzes street art as a creative tool for social change by women or queer identifying street artists around the globe. Despite the fact that women are participating in street art to greater degree than was seen with the birth of modern graffiti, and that street artists often seek to circumvent and avoid the institutional elitism, exclusivity, and sexism of the art world, they are in the minority and remain underrepresented in in global street art anthologies. Focusing on work that is intentionally produced to promote social change or constitute political activism (sometimes called 'artivism'), the author finds two themes in artwork made by women street artists and those working in predominantly female art collectives. Artists in different global contexts produce work concerned with creating safe and inclusive public spaces, and attempt to reclaim representation of female sexuality. This study critically investigates underrepresented women artists/artwork to reveal several commonly used creative strategies. These aesthetic interventions often employ portraiture and novel depictions of the female form that expand a multimodal dialogue about contemporary society, positioning artists as social critics/citizen activists. This work also considers how street art photography and online sharing via social media has expanded once marginalized artists' capacities to reach viewers beyond local neighborhoods, generate global audiences and networks, and establish connections between local issues and broader public discourses. Street art encompasses a wide range of creative practices with goals ranging from silly to serious; this research highlights the power of women pasting and painting in the street.
Malcolm Jacobson - Subcultural memory - photographs and aging graffiti writers
This is a study of the importance of photographs for identity work as subcultural practitioners age and (re)construct groupness. The empirical case consists of social practices centered around photographs of Swedish graffiti made between 1984 and 1992. I study how analog photo prints in the possession of individual writers are crowdsourced and circulated in social media. The endpoint of the studied case is a substantial photo book that contains some five hundred crowdsourced subcultural photographs. In a short foreword to this book the graffiti writer Bonus points out its purpose. We learn that writers carry shared memories of youth graffiti as a life changing emotional experience. The book aims to carry over this experience to the readers. As such the book is not an endpoint but a starting point for continuous subcultural memory work.
The purpose of this paper is to bring understanding to how photographs facilitate identity work and (re)construction of group belonging as participants age. I investigate what subcultural practitioners do with photos, and what photos do with them.
The paper study construction of collective meaning and construction of a shared past drawing on cultural sociology (Alexander 2008), critical visual analysis (Rose 2016) and memory studies (Halbwachs 1980, 1992; Zerubavel 1996).
Carlos Mare – About Graffiti Museum (Miami, US)
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in large cities all over the United States, children invented a new art form that started with writing their names on walls in their neighborhoods. Local governments launched cleaning campaigns and mandated that young writers be arrested for their vandalism, but the movement could not be stopped. Unrelenting young people forged ahead at a feverish pace with creative innovations and inspired generations of new practitioners. In no time, the wall writings quickly developed to become more elaborate and decorative. Taking on unique and distinguishable signifiers like arrows, crowns and other innovations through design and color, this became the blueprint for tags, throw-ups, masterpieces, and the elaborate works seen today. Fifty years later, the Museum of Graffiti was formed to preserve graffiti’s history and celebrate its emergence in design, fashion, advertising, and galleries. The Museum experience includes an indoor exhibition space, eleven exterior murals, a fine art gallery, and a world-class gift shop stocked with limited edition merchandise and exclusive items from the world’s most talented graffiti artists.
Todd Bressi - Interim Coordinator, Artistic Planning Mural Arts Philadelphia
For over 35 years, Mural Arts has united artists and communities through a collaborative process, rooted in the traditions of mural-making, to create art that transforms public spaces and individual lives. Mural Arts engages communities in 50–100 public art projects each year, and maintains its growing collection through a restoration initiative. Our core program areas—Art Education, Restorative Justice, and Porch Light—yield unique, project-based learning opportunities for thousands of youth and adults. Each year, 15,000 residents and visitors tour Mural Arts’ outdoor art gallery, which has become part of the city’s civic landscape and a source of pride and inspiration, earning Philadelphia international recognition as the “City of Murals.”
8 July - Urban Creativity Studies
Mattia Boscaino - Developing a qualitative approach to the study of the street art world
Street art is a complex social world where a diverse set of actors contribute to determining the value of creativities. Street artists, curators, bloggers, photographers, museums, galleries, the public, and other actors interact with street artworks and influence the way they are perceived. In this multi-faceted context, it is clear that both the value and meaning of street art is not exclusively dependent on the intention of the authors but changes according to who views and uses the artwork for their purposes. Although diversity is interesting for the sake of research, finding a research methodology able to comprise the diverse perspectives briefly illustrated above, can be difficult. A multi-method qualitative study conducted between the 2017 and 2019, attempted to include many aspects of the social structure of street art in order to understand how street artworks transform from unknown to renowned in the digital era. The study proved to be useful to cover many of the various perspectives of some of the actors mentioned above. Indeed, data collection consisted in conducting semi-structured interviews as well as analysing digital conversations where street artworks were interaction happened within either specialised or non-specialised audiences. Semistructured interviews were conducted with street artists, street art curators and street art connoisseurs - bloggers, administrators of digital platforms, photographers, etcetera - while digital conversations were considered in order to grasp the significance of the interactions happening between the street artwork and its audience(s), amongst street artists, and within the digital audience. Analysing the data via thematic analysis revealed a multi-dimensional structure of the street artworld, and allowed an understanding of how street artworks become renowned in the digital era. This methodological approach allowed including different professional and personal perspectives, as well as integrating the personal accounts with the observation of in situ interactions.
Gabriela Leal - Street Epistemologies
This research journey started at the street, among drops of latex paint and spray cans, in São Paulo, 2016. The ethnography developed at that time, during my master's research, allowed me to access and describe some particularities of an urban practice - graffiti writing - as well as it also revealed a São Paulo that I did not know until then. At the same time that I could identify in this practice particulars ways of using, reading, and appropriating the city; those same ways of relating to the urban space taught me things through specific knowledge. Some years later, I approached pixação through new research projects, which allowed me to confirm some research topics that accompanied me since I started thinking about cities' issues with graffiti-writers. Graffiti and pixação are ways of thinking invested in ways of acting, which through the specific use of urban space, leave marks that modify it aesthetically and symbolically. This city's experience produces effects on writers and pixadores, whose ways of being and thinking are forged in this using and painting the street. It is possible to identify a poetic in there, that is, a way of getting to know the world and reinventing it, which, in the particular context of São Paulo, concerns experiences that start on the margins and edges of the city. Through the rolês (getting up) - that implies an intense and extensive circulation on the urban fabric
- writers and pixadores develop a particular way of organizing what is perceived in the city, which, in turn, reveals a specific knowledge regime about the urban space. It is about the production of this knowledge, this street epistemologies, genuinely urban, that I intend to reflect on.
Lachlan MacDowall
Flash Forward Melbourne - 40 acts / 40 artists / 40 laneways / All new work / All free / Melbourne 2021.
Carlos Mare – About NYU , Hip Hop Education Center
The Hip-Hop Education Center (HHEC) cultivates and develops Hip-Hop scholars, teaching artists, activists, and social entrepreneurs in the effort to professionalize the field of Hip-Hop Education and inform the larger education sector. It achieves this through qualitative and quantitative research, program evaluation, community outreach and programming, teacher training and placement, policy development, advocacy, archiving, and social enterprising.
Clara Sarmento - The Project StreetArtCEI
In contemporary urban Northern Portugal, cultural tourism is a primary factor of socio-economic empowerment, decentralization and development, provided it does not become another factor of gentrification and social segregation, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed the seemingly unstoppable boom in tourism. Aware of these challenges, the Center for Intercultural Studies continues to develop the project StreetArtCEI – Routes of Graffiti & Street Art in Porto and Northern Portugal, a territory with a rich variety of distinct urban narratives.
StreetArtCEI blurs the frontiers between dominant and marginal cultures, their practices, symbols and aesthetic manifestations, as projections of the communities’ feelings and concerns. The polysemic visual narratives of graffiti and street art generate and display valuable information on the citizen’s understanding of their built environment.
StreetArtCEI works with artists, local municipalities and communities, to research under a critical standpoint the experience of the urban territory. The project website is an open-access tool that provides more than 3000 images collected up to now, 12 geographical routes and 12 author’s routes, with 500 POIs - Points Of Interest, archives and critical texts. More geographical, author and thematic routes are constantly being produced, alongside actions for entrepreneurship in cultural tourism, and 2 spin-off projects, one on routes of Street Music and another on “Street Art against Covid”, which tries to contribute to the economic recovery of the city. The project has also been working with local municipalities, producing tailor-made routes of graffiti and street art, as well as routes of literature, architecture, heritage, fine arts, gastronomy, and festivals, among others.
Vasco Rodrigues - I wanna be Adored - the evolution of street art in Lisbon
My paper will focus on the evolution of street art in Lisbon since its inception in the late 80's until present day, describing its interaction with public space, reaction from public and private organizations, reaction from the main public and shift in the mentality of both players and the general public, based on personal knowledge and interaction within the street art world.
It will focus on the reasons why graffiti started, became both famous and infamous, shifted towards the designation of street ART and became a worldwide phenomenon, spreading Lisbon's name and trademark as a major player throughout the globe.
It will also focus on the shift of a paradigm between wanting to be famous yet anonymous to the general public in face of the teachings of hip-hop culture, opposed to the glorification, both in the perception of others and financialy, of being a worldwide known artist.
It will also analyse the different shifts of perception from the inhabitants of Lisbon and how it also changed the rise and fall of street art within the city, as well as copy cat phenomena from other municipalities and agents.
Ana Luísa Castro, Ana Gariso - Lisbon vs Porto: Contrasts in urban art public management
Laura Rodrigo, Adris Fernández, Carmen Ruiz - Comparative analysis of urban art cataloguing projects in the cities of Monterrey (Mexico) and Jaén (Spain)
In the last months of 2020 and the first half of 2021, two urban art cataloguing projects have been carried out in two cities in different countries, which have made it possible to put into practice methodological proposals that until now had remained mainly at a theoretical level. This is the project "Painted on the wall. Study of wall painting in the province of Jaén in the XX-XXI centuries'', financed by the Instituto de Estudios Giennenses (Diputación de Jaén, Spain) and the project "The muralist creation of the CALLEGENERA Urban Expressions Festival as cultural artistic consumption" in the city of Monterrey, financed by the Mexican Programme for the Promotion of Cultural Projects and Co-investments. In these projects, methodological systems for working and collecting information, cataloguing sheets and models for interviewing different artists have been developed, with a common theoretical basis, such as the proposals that emerged within the (GE-IIC (Grupo Español de Conservación of International Institute for Conservation of Historic and artistic works) Urban and Public Art Group and taking into account the proposals of the CAPuS project and YOCOCU. For this reason, this paper analyses both projects in terms of their methods and results, and draws conclusions about which options have worked best with a view to optimising resources for future projects. A proposal is also made to improve the catalogue sheets on urban art by including information on the correlation between the work and the communities surrounding it, since urban art only makes sense in its context, and some of this information is lost when the sheets are made. Furthermore, with a view to possible actions for the preservation of the works, the relationship of the communities in which they are integrated with them is fundamental.
Enrico Bonadio - Litigating Copyright in Street Art: The Latest Developments from France and Italy
The talk will cover two recent cases of copyright in street art litigated in Italy and France.
The first legal action has been brought in 2021 by the Rome-based artist Alessia Brabow against the Vatican City before the Court of Rome. The latter had used a wheatpaste created by the former (and placed on a wall in Rome) to design a new stamp which was then sold to the public, in particular collectors. The artist claimed that the Vatican had infringed her economic rights as well as her moral right of integrity. The case is currently pending. The talk will expand on the claims put forward by the artist and the defences which the Vatican could raise.
The second case involved the Paris-based wheatpaste artist COMBO, who is known for creating and placing subversive pieces across France as well as studio artworks. In March 2016 COMBO placed a large wheatpaste on the wall of the Gustave Flaubert College depicting a representation of Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic. By taking an image which evokes the French Revolution, he was able to hijack the message for his own purpose. COMBO’s Marianne indeed represented a young woman with a bare right breast, carrying the tricolour flag on her left shoulder, accompanied by the caption “We want justice”.
To the disdain of COMBO, one of his Marianne wheatpaste appeared in several videos promoting the 2017 presidential race of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French left politician who is currently leader of La France Insoumise ‘Rebellious France’ and a member of the National Assembly. The artist responded stating that “since Jean-Luc has used my work without asking me, I contacted his team via my lawyer to ask them to remove my fresco from their clips”. As this did not happen, COMBO had to start a legal action before the Court of Paris, and the final decision by the court was released in January 2021. The artist lost the case, though. The talk will expand on the reason why his action failed.
Emma Marie L Love - Through the Modern Graffiti Photographers Lense
Through the Modern Graffiti Photographers Lense The new narrative emerging of the modern graffiti documenter is very different from the past. An honest review of why it's important to remember how and why graffiti documenting began so it can continue for the future protection of the culture.
Lorenzo Stefano Iannizzotto, Rafael Sousa Santos - Photography as an instrument to approach Residual Spaces on the Peri-urban Fringe
Lorenzo Stefano Iannizzotto (1994) completed a master’s degree in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence in 2021 with the thesis “Construir entre: Inhabiting the residual spaces on the Lisbon hillside”, with the maximum grade of 110/110 com laude and publication recommended. He was also an erasmus student at BME, Budapest University of Technology and Economics (2017), and at ISCTE, University institute of Lisbon (2018). In 2018 he worked as an intern architect at Ventura Trindade Arquitectos, in Lisbon. In 2016 he won a photography competition at the University of Florence. In 2021 he won an honorable mention in the contest organized by University of Florence Un-locking cities. Nuovi scenari per l’abitare, he took part of a university subject called Fotografia come indagine urbana, about relation between photography and urban studies and he participated in the international conference Grand Projects - Urban Legacies of the late 20th Century, organized by Iscte university of Lisbon. Since 2021, he has worked as an intern architect at Ventura Trindade Arquitectos, in Lisbon.
Rafael Sousa Santos (1991) completed a master’s degree in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) in 2016 with the thesis “Life and movement: Hypothesis of urban regeneration about Porto's Estrada da Circunvalação”. During his master’s, he participated as an intern at the Centre for Studies of the Faculty of Architecture (CEFA-UP) on the development of the Belmonte Revitalization Project (between 2014 and 2015). In 2017 he worked as an intern architect at Contemporânea | Manuel Graça Dias + Egas José Vieira, in Lisbon. Currently he is a PhD student in Architecture at FAUP, with supervisors from FAUP, Politecnico di Milano and Aahrus University, developing a research about the forms of representation and its role in architectural design teaching (since 2017). He also collaborated in the curricular units of Economia Urbana and Urbanística 2 of Integrated Master’s in Architecture (MIARQ) at FAUP (between 2017 and 2020).
Marianne Geraldine Walker -Reclaiming the city through urban art: An exploration of activism in Birmingham and Barcelona.
Through in-depth interviews with urban artists, this paper seeks to further build on the understanding of urban art as an activist tool. The study aims to shed new light on the reality of urban art activism, assessing how its ability to act as a form of resistance has changed in a world where urban art is becoming increasingly monetized and appropriated by private entities. Focusing on both Birmingham and Barcelona, the paper addresses how activist artists manage this new reality and explores whether urban art is still a tool to reclaim the city.
Barbara Priolo - Public art in Riace: challenging capitalism to recapitalize the intercultural community.
Emilia Jeziorowska - Conventionality and innovation. Détournement in 2011-2012 protest art
Andrea Baldini - Street Art, Graffiti, and the Politics of Improvisation
When creating their works, in effect, street artists never bring to light something that has been fully planned in advance. The street, in effect, is a context in constant evolution: The train is moving, a passerby is approaching, or it has started raining. Under risky and uncertain circumstances, street artists are bound to take some artistically salient decisions on the spot. This condition of forced spontaneity is the primary source of those endless aesthetic variations that even similar works of street art show. But there is something more: For the peculiar social norms regulating visibility in modern cities, as we shall see, the spontaneity of street art also carries political significance. In the context of urban aesthetics, the right to improvise becomes then object of power struggles. I call that phenomenon the politics of improvisation.
While aestheticians have discussed at length the role of improvisation in the musical arts, other art kinds just like street art have been largely ignored. Moreover, in the literature, much emphasis has been placed on clarifying the aesthetic and ethical import of improvisation, but little effort has been made in examining its political implications. In this presentaion, I set forth to explore the heretofore overlooked connection between improvisation and street art. I argue that street art’s improvisational nature is grounded on its spontaneous uses of public spaces.
As a consequence of their spontaneity, works of street art are rough and unpolished, thus realizing a distinct aesthetics of imperfection. Such an aesthetics significantly contrasts with the authoritarian perfectionism that dominates the appearances of our cities, whose landscapes are tightly controlled and carefully planned by the authorities. Such a challenge illuminates, within the context of the politics of improvisation, the extra-aesthetic significance of street art’s spontaneity: By encouraging free expression, street art does not simply have the potential to enrich the aesthetics of our cities, but also to create suitable conditions for more satisfactory and joyful social lives.
Mattia Ronconi, Jorge Manuel Lopes Brandão Pereira, Paula Cristina Almeida Tavares - Representation and Reconstruction of Memories and Visual Subculture
Laima Nomeikaite - Street art, heritage and everyday improvisation
Traditionally, heritage research has emphasized problem solving and object-led scientific thinking – that is, thinking that is kind of detached from the researcher’s everyday life. In contrast, this paper calls for the improvisational approach of non- representational theory to be applied within street art and heritage research. Non- representational theory renders the liveliness of everyday improvisational performance and the temporary, affective, spontaneous, and relational aspects of the world and the academic work. In my empirical investigation, improvisation occurred through my random and spontaneous conversations with the visual artist Munch Malo and the ‘Hotel Havana’ urban space in Oslo, Norway. Drawing on non-representational theory – and the messiness of improvisational everyday practice – the research decodes my experiences with Munch Malo and the urban space, which led me to better understand not only Munch Malo’s artistic practices, but also movement, change, affective atmospheres, materiality and encounters, more generally. Furthermore, situated in my own experience of the urban space, this research article illustrates that improvisational everyday practice can, in itself, function as a performative method as it can engender creativity, experimentation and new theoretical and practical knowledge about mundane life. The purpose of this article is two-fold: first, to illustrate the spontaneous and creative nature of heritage research and second, to highlight the improvisational everyday practice as a performative urban heritage methodology. Underpinning the performative heritage methodology is the idea that everyday improvisational practices may generate a stronger understanding of street art, urban cultures and the social world.
Jacob Kimvall - Highway Resurrected?
The in the Stockholm-region famous graffiti-mural ’Highway’ (1989) by SHOF was partly destroyed in an anti-graffiti effort during the summer of 2019, only weeks before its 30s birthday. The destruction led to an unsanctioned and populous restoration attempt by locals and members. This paper discuss the unusual popularity of this mural, and look at the different stakeholders in the process of the possible preservation of the mural, including an auto ethnographic reflection of the authors own role, who have followed this piece since its creation in 1989. The purpose is to use the example of ’Highway’ as a case-study of the current musealisation and heritagisation of graffiti and street art. The results indicate an historical process where graffiti-murals have went from hypothetical, over theoretical to factual – if still also precarious – cultural heritage.
Isabel Carrasco - Diving into a street art intervention from 1979
Jaume Gomez Muñoz - Nasty Stuff: Research interviews and graffiti archive by Craig Castleman 1978. Research by INDAGUE and Contorno Urbano
INDAGUE Association for the Research and Dissemination of Graffiti and Urban Art together with Fundacion Contorno Urbano and Craig Castleman will publish in the coming months the unpublished work Nasty Stuff (Craig Castleman, 1978)
Nasty Stuff was Craig Castleman's first academic research paper. An academic project started with his students from the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, where he was a professor in the English department until the spring of 1978. This research work was later transformed into a brilliant PhD defended at Columbia University by the prestigious anthropologist Margaret Mead.
The results of this Doctoral Thesis were published in 1981 under the title "Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York" by the publisher M.I.T. Press, a book that translated into numerous languages such as Spanish had a decisive impact on the graffiti diaspora and on the maturation of numerous old school graffiti scenes in Europe and South America.
The documentary value of Nasty Stuff lies in its numerous unpublished interviews giving voice to: the staff of the Transit Police Department, central characters in the expansion of the Hip-Hop concept such as Fab5 Freddy and writers such as Jae 5, Adom 2, Daze, Slick , Son1, Carmen, Keno & Chino, Bama, Mitch, Rat & Candy, Wicked Gary and Lee Quiñones.
Nasty Stuff also delves into the photographic archive of Craig Castleman, publishing for the first time numerous photographs taken from 1978 to 1985 that illustrate the evolution and maturation of the graffiti scene in New York.
Nasty Stuff is configured as well as the continuation of the Castleman Tour 2019 Project and the book “Getting Up: 40 years later” published for the occasion. Both projects coordinated by INDAGUE and Fundación Contorno Urbano have the mission to create a documentary archive of public access in the coming years.
9 July - Urban User Experience
Alejandra Isabel Taylhardat, Marie Martins, Marla Dias, José Miguel Abreu - Transhuman Simulation
As a problem statement for our Interaction Design project, we consider focusing on the area of Post-Humanism, specifically tackling the anticipatory vision of how the creation of a "new body" can be for human beings in the days to come, betting on improvements of the human condition, associating ideas like longer life span, immortality and the objectification of the body.
As our goal for this project, we present the benefits as well as the disadvantages in a nuanced way. We try to show a certain awareness in the ethical sense of the philosophy of human life, creating a kind of ironic remark of this utopia that is unreachable. There is indeed a rupture from the humanist human to one that is posthumanist, in which technology becomes the focus for our development. This new idea that the human being is not at the center of the universe, that he himself is interconnected with the environment as well as things. Moreover, the idea of the objectification of the body, being able to show the countless possibilities of what a body is and how it could be changed.
The project is developed in a digital platform focused on a virtual-visual experience and of irony and self-awareness, that lets the user reflect upon the theme. Thus, a kind of personalization platform and the issues that arise in the creation of bodies to be inhabited was developed in two stages: in a first stage, physical creation, within new emerging technologies. In a second phase, of mind uploading, where memories and consciousness will be uploaded into the body so that the user can inhabit it. For all of this it was necessary to do research and a pre-study on the possible users, through a questionnaire made for them.
Inês Vargas Frazão, Maria Horta, Catarina Landim, Ema Caetano - Potential Social and Economic Repercussions of The Transhumanist Revolution
Our project consists of a visual novel game called Not Today, centered around the topic of transhumanism and its possible repercussions in our society.
Transhumanism is a cultural and intellectual movement that advocates the creation of mechanisms to enhance various parameters of human life and revolutionise the notion of what it means to be human. It presents very attractive solutions, a long and promising future for mankind, and the potential achievement of the dream of eternal life. However, from a social and ethical point of view, we encounter many obstacles to the soundness of the proposed solutions.
Through our project, we managed to create an interactive experience that aims to expose a utopian scenario in which our society was divided into two distinct factions: the transhumans (the rich and powerful) and the humans (the lowlifes). This split in society occurred with the arrival of the transhumanist revolution, which widened the already existing social inequalities.
Not Today takes the player on a journey into this new society, through the eyes of a member of the poor class that decides to rebel against the system. During his cross-country journey to seek freedom, the player will learn more about transhumanism and its possible harmful effects and will go through various challenges, gradually getting to know this society in depth.
The ultimate goal is above all to surprise the players and take them through an immersive experience to get to know the darker side of this movement, to foster debate on the subject and generate more sensitivity to the issue.
Duarte Costa, Francisco Janes, Maria Proença, Rodrigo Amâncio - ATMA, Interfacing with the brain
Catarina Diniz, Cláudia Gomes, Sara Encarnação, Vadym Skaskiv - Aeon: An Interactive Experience on Virtual Immortality and the Potencial Consequences of Data Surveillance
This project consists of an interactive experience, concentrated in a website, that serves the purpose of provoking a critical reflection on the subjects of Virtual Immortality, Data Surveillance and the amount of personal information that we disclose online, specially to big companies such as Google and Facebook. The critical reflection and ethical debate that the project aimed to raise were made possible through the formulation of a futuristic scenario, that is fictional yet quite realistic, considering the advances on technology that might soon allow Virtual Immortality to be a reality. This futuristic scenario is provided by Aeon, the center figure of the project and main object of its development. Aeon is the name of a (fictional) company that sells Virtual Immortality through the creation of a personal Avatar that is generated based on the digital footprint of the interested person. This Avatar is activated upon the death of the person in question and that Avatar proceeds to exist on the “Virtual Space” also managed and made available by the company. This process is simulated in the interactive experience, to exemplify how one company can extract all the data that exists concerning the user as soon as the user accepts certain terms & conditions and privacy policies. While the main goal is to try to make the users question themselves about the quantity and quality of information that they disclose online, there are also questions that can be formulated in this experience about consciousness and moral values related to Virtual Immortality. Nevertheless, these questions and critical reflection is mostly dependent on the users and their own opinion on the matter.
Bruno Miguel Silva, Helena Maria dos Anjos, Pedro Diogo Tavares, Lola Manuela Meintjes - Globule: Control data in order to manipulate the algorithm.
When people are connected to the internet, their personal data is being shared with companies that use it for their own benefit, almost as a factory farm for human beings. Hence, by tracking and profiling everyone, those companies make profits by manipulating our behaviour. In fact, they are not trying to sell their products; each one of the internet users becomes “the product.”
In addition, there is the “filter bubble”, a term that refers to the results of the algorithm that constrains what one finds online, creating a unique universe of information for each of the users, altering the search results.
Globule is a free software that allows the users to scan all the information available about themselves across the internet, listing the data shared and creating new profiles of data to manipulate the algorithm and increase the level of control of internet search results. It offers a complete customization of the alternative profiles, creating a random profile.
Thus, this app interferes with the algorithm used to collect information, according with the user’s profile: controls the search results, preventing the filters and reducing restriction, debugging and redirecting them, to provide access to others; to boycott, deceive and confuse the system, or those using the data collected, in order to avoid any kind of harassment; or to protect the privacy users by managing the data that becomes available online.
Eduardo Féteira, Raquel Gomes, Mafalda Rodrigues, Matilde Fernandes - The Playground - the future of platform capitalism
The Playground is a project addressing the monetization of social media and the way in which these platforms use collected data to develop a selection process that studies and conditions its interviewees through technology to achieve its own independent gains. The dystopic scenario takes place 5 years in the future when, after decades of data mining the most personal information about the lives of its users, the big tech companies united to create a new and exclusive social network platform called PLAYGROUND, that offers close contact and relationship building with higher status and income individuals. This alliance between Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon and Paypal becomes a self-feeding system that uses the individual databases of each older platforms to develop a multiple functionality and streamlined services platform. This platform selects its users through an invite and interview-only process. The reason for this system is to ensure the approval of members that are active on the platform for which they will be compensated for according to their levels of engagement and quality of produced content. The critical moment will be the interview, conducted by an AI which will evaluate how much each candidate is worth to the platform – and to the exploitative goals of the AI and its parent companies. This AI is called MINDER. The appeal of this platform is its exclusivity, the closeness and networking opportunities it provides to people of similar or higher social status and its social currency. This platform thus becomes a trap for the collection and commercialization of further data, through the control and enhancement of user interaction through its patented technology, under the guise of an exclusive content-sharing platform, very similar to the way we currently interact with our devices and web platforms.
Gustavo Mello Castro - Tod. An AI braille translator for visualy impaired people
Ana Henriques, Victor M Almeida, José Gomes Pinto - The problem with gender-blind UX
Gender-blind UX design hinges upon an assumption that designing equally is the same as designing for equality. That, however, is inaccurate, as gender-blindness is merely a synonym for neutrality. Neutrality, because it lacks a concerted effort to subvert, favors hegemonic values and epistemologies, which counters the purported aim of equality. Supposedly objective methods of analysis, such as data gathering and interpreting, are not deprived of this hegemonic bias either. As such, through an acknowledgment of ethics, the designer must recognize that they are, indeed, imbuing their values into their designs, which bears influence on the ways in which the user interacts and interprets those designs, a notion which is especially relevant to a field concerned with user experience. This may be done deliberately or by accident, but it is always inevitable. Ethics is, in this way, inextricable from the design process, and, thus, the present article aims to propose that designing for equality requires the designer to act as an ethical agent — responsibly, consciously and knowingly — especially if one hopes to avoid a design which embodies and communicates oppressive notions. In particular, within the purview of ethics and with resort to some case studies and examples, it argues that designing towards gender equality requires not a gender-blind design process, but rather one which is specifically gender-conscious. Further, this article also offers some suggestions as to how we might begin to act as ethical design agents and implement marginalized epistemologies into the design process.
Mariana Ramos - Interaction design in museological activity, include or exclude
Jon Yablonski – author of the book - Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services (Detroit, USA)
Hollander, Justin - Biometrics and the Public Realm: Urban Design and Planning During the COVID Pandemic
10 July - Practise driven approaches
Bjorn Van Poucke – Street Art Today 2 The 50 most influential street artists today (book)
Going beyond the cliché of street art as artistically responsible graffiti, this Who's Who of the international contemporary street art scene features 50 of the top street artists working today, complete with exclusive interviews. More than a revised edition of Street Art Today (2015), this book offers a completely new and updated roster of artists, and highlights the evolution of street art in all its multi-faceted complexity. Street Art Today is beautifully presented and written, in the main, in straightforward language accessible to all.
Martyn Reed, Susan Hansen - Nuart Journal “Lockdown/Reconnect”
The articles in Nuart Journal’s LOCKDOWN issue illustrate the productivity of the unexpected creative alliances we have forged in the face of this particular moment in our collective history.
Jaume Gomez Muñoz - Strictly Toyz Magazine 3: documenting toy and bad graffiti (book)
Strictly Toyz is the only regular print magazine that focuses on toy graffiti culture, citizens writing and bad urban poetry. Edited by the Academic of graffiti Jaume Gómez, Strictly Toyz publishes its third issue in a context that has redefined culture on a global level.
This time he does it in double format with 180 full color pages of communicative garbage a great synonymous with humanity. At Strictly Toyz we understand that for mainstream society and the graffiti subculture, graphic garbage establishes the margin between the visually acceptable and the unworkable, between what remains inside and what remains outside graffiti subculture. But, without its existence it would be impossible to establish its own limits.
In this third edition we have decided to strongly cover the phenomenon of poetry and urban writing that is combined with toy graffiti and graphic experimentation to shape a more extensive edition. More than 294 shots of creations that possess the iconic magic that we have been documenting these years: inscriptions, insults, adolescent writing in which we detect a great participatory growth of women, writing from outsiders, sexual offers, figuration of all kinds and infra-graffiti (even suburban) that stands out for its particular execution materials, its forms and strokes, their colors, their references or their particular inscription in the context.
From Catalonia, Philosophia Callejera has provided us with endless photographs focused especially on surreal writing executed by all kinds of citizens. From Madrid, our great collaborator E-1000 has once again surprised us with his powerful infra-graffiti photographs that emerged in mostly rural contexts. From Valencia, Lucas Sanchis has also offered us a good assortment of toy graffiti mostly executed within the city. In addition, the photographic fund of Strictly Toyz has provided the rest of the materials, especially deepening infra-graffiti and surreal writing.
In short, a large compilation of writing and graffiti waste that a contains great communicative and aesthetic power due to its despicable and disgusting peculiarities.
Jo Preußler - Graffitimuseum project
Graffitimuseum is a project by Jo Preußler, Aljoscha Greich and Stefan Reuter. Since 2001, the group has appeared in city walks, happenings and discussion events, in theater and performance projects, exhibitions and in games in urban space.
Graffitimuseum is an artist collective from Germany. They are doing performances, lectures and installations.
Rafael Sousa Santos - Simple impressions of a linear territory
The modern belief in rationality and technical-scientific knowledge as the main references for the recognition and management of the territory, led to the simplification of the urban reality to a universalizing entity, reducible to simple schemes and taxonomies [1]. As referred by Lamas [2] the disciplinary abstraction assumed in traditional reading processes does not allow to fully explain the urban object, either in its configuration or in its formation process. Thus, the “passive” analysis needs to be complemented with in loco assessment, through the cross-reading between the erudition of scientific knowledge and the impressive approach. Instinctive or emotional perception seems to be the key means to apprehend the particularities that constitute the identity and values of territories and societies - assuming, as argued by Lynch, that perception is an eminently creative act [3]. It is therefore essential to experience the everyday life, to take the position of the observer, not only through physical presence, but also, and above all, through movement [4]. With this article it is intended to present the results of an impressive approach to a linear territory, taking as a case study the Estrada da Circunvalação of Porto. With reference to the work developed by Gianfranco Rosi in Sacro Gra (2013), the process of recognizing the case study was conducted over several days, in order to record the relationship between the configuration of spaces and ways of living. Photography and written notes were the types of record used during the observation periods. The field material was later transformed into a narrative sequence, taking on the character of a travel diary.
Stephen Pritchard - Conversations On Walls
Ana Cristina García-Luna Romero, Javier Alberto Flores Leal - Monterrey, city of urban expressions
In the XXI century, the cultural sphere of urban expressions are a reflection of the perception of life in the city, of the routines and figurations that tend to relate to the urban environment and that come to shake or shape the conditions of urban life . The CALLEGENERA Festival of Urban Expressions marks a drastic change within urban artistic movements and offers recognition to urban expressions in the state of Nuevo León, México. In this way, Callegenera consolidates itself as one of the most influential art forums and urban manifestations in the state and the country. In this way, the festival alludes to the heritage that persists, and that most of the time is hidden from the elite culture, due to its connection with prejudices about contemporary methods of urban expression. Since its inception, the festival was mobilized to bring together the various urban expressions that exist in the city in a single space, where the production of new talents and the exchange between them can coexist. The intention of this festival is that citizens recognize the streets in a different way, the spaces and their aesthetics, managing to change their gaze to value all urban expressions as part of their own culture. The research group seeks to disseminate the ten-year history of the festival by documenting the works of their previous editions that have been built within the urban environment and how these works of arts had influenced the citizens by their presence in the metropolitan context, and also demonstrating the impact generated by the festival on issues of revaluation of street art within the city.
Sandi Abram - Ljubljana Street Art Festival
Ljubljana Street Art Festival is the first international contemporary street art festival in Slovenia. Launched in 2019 and born from a passion for urban art, the festival is envisioned as an annual event that brings together the global street art community by inviting international and local artists and scholars in collaboration with interested cultural organizations and the public. It also invites visitors to read the streets and participate in activities, as well as showcases young, emerging generations of street artists to ensure a bright future for one of the most important art movements of the 21st century.
Luca Borriello – talk about - Inopinatum Centro Studi sulla Creatività Urbana
INOPINATUM Study Center on Urban Creativity was created by INWARD, an Italian nationwide organization active in valorizing Urban Creativity (graffiti writing, murales, street art, urban design), with the Department of Communication and Social Research of Sapienza University in Rome in 2009, and from 2010 is realizing national and international events to promote a more conscious knowledge of Urban Creativity.
Lori Goldstein - Manager of WESTAF’s Public Art Archive.
WESTAF (Western States Arts Federation) is a regional nonprofit arts service organization dedicated to strengthening the financial, organizational, and policy infrastructure of the arts in the West. WESTAF assists state arts agencies, arts organizations, and artists in their quest to serve diverse audiences, enrich the lives of local communities, and provide access to the arts and arts education for all. Through innovative programming, advocacy, research, technology, and grantmaking, WESTAF encourages the creative advancement and preservation of the arts regionally and through a national network of customers and alliances.
PAA is a free, continually growing, online and mobile database of completed public artworks. By uniting records from public art organizations and artists into one comprehensive resource, the Archive aims to raise awareness about the value of public art and help make it possible for stakeholders to advance the professionalism of public artists and practitioners in allied fields. Since the Archive’s inception in 2010, public art organizations and artists have submitted informational text, images, and additional multimedia files describing completed public artworks at no cost.
Anna Rodrigues - Challenging Media (Mis)Representations of Indigenous Women and Girls through Public Art Interventions
A number of public art interventions that I have photographed, such as murals and street art, have been created by artists who are women and identify as Indigenous. When analyzing those images, I have identified narratives of empowerment, resilience and agency which contrast sharply with past and contemporary (mis) representations of Indigenous women and girls found in Canadian mass media. For example, a common narrative found in popular culture and media stories include Indigenous women and girls being defined through victimhood (Longstaffe, 2017). Other negative representations include being incompetent mothers, individuals without agency and having drug and/or alcohol addictions (Jiwani and Young, 2006). Employing critical visual analysis, this presentation will look at public art interventions that counteract misrepresentations of Indigenous women and girls in mass media in Canada. In addition, it will discuss the ways in which these pieces function as a form of public pedagogy by educating people who encounter these works on Indigenous culture and traditions.
Helena Maria Silva Santana, Maria Rosário da Silva Santana - How street art can honor culture and their artists
Throughout the ages, street art has surprised us, and more and more, with proposals for works of undeniable aesthetic and artistic value. Proposed in open spaces, these works contemplate various forms and intentions. In one of its aspects, they aim to pay homage to culture and those who survive, promoting different ways of looking at man, life, and art. In making street art alert, drawing attention to various themes, some unexpected, the themes it uses emerge from life and places. These artistic manifestations propose a new look at art and spaces in the city. Integrating into the spaces, rehabilitating people, buildings, places, the elements that emerge from it make the places where they settle, places of search and enjoyment.
In this context, we have witnessed the proliferation of works of art that pay homage to the culture and artists of the city. By identifying and analysing some of these elements, and examining their work proposals, we intend to discuss the way their authors shape them, alerting not only to facts and themes, but also to issues of a social, moral and environmental nature.
In this paper, we intend to show how urban art pays homage to Portuguese culture and artists, namely those of fado's intangible heritage of humanity, referring to their representation in city spaces, namely Lisbon. Likewise, we want to show how these events serve for the rehabilitation of spaces and as interventions at the social and community level, bringing culture to everyone (spaces and people), promoting their search and enjoyment. In another, we show how its realization, dignifies an art form that in its origin was considered an alternative and minor.
Ilaria Lombardo - Graffiti in the Dheisheh refugee camp
My purpose is to demonstrate that visual art plays an actively productive role in the spatial formation of the Palestinian refugee camp. Specifically, I focus on the role of graffiti in the Dheisheh camp (Bethlehem, West Bank). The exceptionality of this camp arises from its particular social and spatial asset: as with many heterotopias, it is neither private nor public; it is in a legal and spatial limbo where durable forms of ‘commonality’ take place. I analyse the production of graffiti in Dheisheh as being embedded in the ‘common’ space of the camp that, I claim, generates and is generated by graffiti.
By analysing some of the graffiti that I photographed in the Dheisheh camp, I demonstrate how they contribute to the formation of a community that shares common counter-narratives. The walls of the camp are a space of social and political expression, open to everyone. Additionally, I argue that the temporary essence of the graffiti form is linked to the precariousness of the refugees’ experience: the camp is a temporary solution and its walls do not belong to anyone. Thus, graffiti are not understood as permanent pieces of art, as often happens in Western contexts.
I understand the refugees’ claim for temporariness – linked to the right of return – as being related to the refusal of ‘museumisation’ that needs to be seen more widely as a claim against the culture of the museum as a place of representation of the Other, as a space for imposing a narration and erasing minor histories and narratives. By insisting on the relations between aesthetics and politics in non-Western contexts – from a postcolonial, decolonial and subaltern perspective – I read the politics of refugee artistic production as a truly radical culture that eludes and deconstructs the subjugating mechanisms of (neo)colonial and global power.
Vittorio Parisi - The Weird and the Urban
Kristin Lee Moss - The Power of Painting and Paste-Ups
This work examines the contemporary global phenomenon of street art. Using a visual culture studies approach, this research critically analyzes street art as a creative tool for social change by women or queer identifying street artists around the globe. Despite the fact that women are participating in street art to greater degree than was seen with the birth of modern graffiti, and that street artists often seek to circumvent and avoid the institutional elitism, exclusivity, and sexism of the art world, they are in the minority and remain underrepresented in in global street art anthologies. Focusing on work that is intentionally produced to promote social change or constitute political activism (sometimes called 'artivism'), the author finds two themes in artwork made by women street artists and those working in predominantly female art collectives. Artists in different global contexts produce work concerned with creating safe and inclusive public spaces, and attempt to reclaim representation of female sexuality. This study critically investigates underrepresented women artists/artwork to reveal several commonly used creative strategies. These aesthetic interventions often employ portraiture and novel depictions of the female form that expand a multimodal dialogue about contemporary society, positioning artists as social critics/citizen activists. This work also considers how street art photography and online sharing via social media has expanded once marginalized artists' capacities to reach viewers beyond local neighborhoods, generate global audiences and networks, and establish connections between local issues and broader public discourses. Street art encompasses a wide range of creative practices with goals ranging from silly to serious; this research highlights the power of women pasting and painting in the street.
Malcolm Jacobson - Subcultural memory - photographs and aging graffiti writers
This is a study of the importance of photographs for identity work as subcultural practitioners age and (re)construct groupness. The empirical case consists of social practices centered around photographs of Swedish graffiti made between 1984 and 1992. I study how analog photo prints in the possession of individual writers are crowdsourced and circulated in social media. The endpoint of the studied case is a substantial photo book that contains some five hundred crowdsourced subcultural photographs. In a short foreword to this book the graffiti writer Bonus points out its purpose. We learn that writers carry shared memories of youth graffiti as a life changing emotional experience. The book aims to carry over this experience to the readers. As such the book is not an endpoint but a starting point for continuous subcultural memory work.
The purpose of this paper is to bring understanding to how photographs facilitate identity work and (re)construction of group belonging as participants age. I investigate what subcultural practitioners do with photos, and what photos do with them.
The paper study construction of collective meaning and construction of a shared past drawing on cultural sociology (Alexander 2008), critical visual analysis (Rose 2016) and memory studies (Halbwachs 1980, 1992; Zerubavel 1996).
Carlos Mare – About Graffiti Museum (Miami, US)
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in large cities all over the United States, children invented a new art form that started with writing their names on walls in their neighborhoods. Local governments launched cleaning campaigns and mandated that young writers be arrested for their vandalism, but the movement could not be stopped. Unrelenting young people forged ahead at a feverish pace with creative innovations and inspired generations of new practitioners. In no time, the wall writings quickly developed to become more elaborate and decorative. Taking on unique and distinguishable signifiers like arrows, crowns and other innovations through design and color, this became the blueprint for tags, throw-ups, masterpieces, and the elaborate works seen today. Fifty years later, the Museum of Graffiti was formed to preserve graffiti’s history and celebrate its emergence in design, fashion, advertising, and galleries. The Museum experience includes an indoor exhibition space, eleven exterior murals, a fine art gallery, and a world-class gift shop stocked with limited edition merchandise and exclusive items from the world’s most talented graffiti artists.
Todd Bressi - Interim Coordinator, Artistic Planning Mural Arts Philadelphia
For over 35 years, Mural Arts has united artists and communities through a collaborative process, rooted in the traditions of mural-making, to create art that transforms public spaces and individual lives. Mural Arts engages communities in 50–100 public art projects each year, and maintains its growing collection through a restoration initiative. Our core program areas—Art Education, Restorative Justice, and Porch Light—yield unique, project-based learning opportunities for thousands of youth and adults. Each year, 15,000 residents and visitors tour Mural Arts’ outdoor art gallery, which has become part of the city’s civic landscape and a source of pride and inspiration, earning Philadelphia international recognition as the “City of Murals.”
