From graffiti to pixação

Urban protest in Brazil*

Paula Gil Larruscahim

Introduction

‘The people of Brazil’s biggest metropolis don’t have a problem with graffiti. It’s
pichação they can’t stand.’ This is how Caleb Neelon (2006: 30), a mainstream
American graffiti writer (and co-author of the History of the American Graffiti)
observes the context of Brazilian urban scenario graffiti. While during the 1990s,
traditional graffiti was institutionalized and commodified in the realm of hip-hop
culture, oppositional styles, called pichação and pixação respectively, were
increasingly associated with vandalism, crime, grime or, as paulistanos (people
from São Paulo) tend to call it, ‘visual pollution’. Thus, in Brazil there is no war
against graffiti, but against pichação and pixação, which has been considered a
crime since 1998 and is in 2011 clearly detached from the traditional graffiti style
by a criminal act, which aims to protect the environment.
‘Pichação’ (with ‘ch’) started in the 1960s and currently refers to general urban
calligraphies, whose content can be poetic and playful, but also explicitly political.
‘Pixação’ (with ‘x’) is the typical style of São Paulo. Currently, it is spread across
the whole country. It looks quite similar to pichação with ‘ch’, with hieroglyphics,
also known as ‘straight tags’, painted with black latex ink. The goal of pixação’
writers is to spread their tags throughout the city, as much as possible, and par‐
ticularly on the difficult to reach and highly visible places such as the tops of
buildings. There is no explicit political content. ‘Brazilian graffiti’ (or mainstream
graffiti) was predominantly influenced by the American graffiti and hip hop
movement. It was decriminalized and even sponsored by the state and is cur‐
rently seen as a new muralist movement (Besser: 14).1

* The author thanks the editors and anonymous reviewers for the constructive comments and
Willem de Haan and René van Swaaningen in particular for editing the article.
1 Finally, there is ‘grapixo’, which is a mix of ‘pixação’ and ‘Brazilian graffiti’. It consists of a
straight tag, symbolized by two lines, one black and other colorful. Grapixo will not be analysed
in this article, because it does not play a specific role in the argument I want to make.

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1. Political pichação: for a life without turnstiles

2. Pixação or the ‘straight tag’: DI

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 From graffiti to pixação

3. (Mainstream) Brazilian mural graffiti at Beco do Batman

4. Grapixo style: ‘Vandalos Kep’ Crew

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Paula Gil Larruscahim

In Brazilian graffiti politics, a special feature marks the beginning of the

twenty first century: the use of public campaigns promoting mainstream graffiti
in order to fight the transgressive styles of pichação and pixação. By exploring the
nonlinear history and stories of pichação and pixação, of illegal and mainstream
Brazilian graffiti, I hope to demonstrate to what extent these subcultures are sim‐
ilar or indeed different, specifically focusing on the tensions produced by its dif‐
ferent dynamics.
Focusing on these dynamics as a research problem, the main aim of this article is
to demonstrate to what extent the commodification and co-option of mainstream
graffiti, and the simultaneous criminalization of pichação, have contributed to
the emergence of pixação with ‘x’ as a movement that uses aggression and trans‐
gression in order to claim the right to the city and the use of the urban space.
Analyzing the contradictory process of on the one hand, criminalization, and on
the other, commercialization of different styles of graffiti and street art is a
means to understand the blurring boundaries between public and private space
and the crescent spatial segregation in urban centers.
In this article, I will 1) present the current state of graffiti, pichação and pixação
in Brazil; 2) point out the relationship between the commodification of graffiti
and the criminalization of pichação and pixação; and 3) discuss the shifting boun‐
daries between lifestyle, illegality and resistance.2 In the context of this special
issue of Tijdschrift over Cultuur & Criminaliteit on visual representations of crime,
the focus of this article is on how the artistic value attributed to graffiti came
along with a process of commodification in which the critical political meaning is
often, but not always, obscured.

Cultural criminology, graffiti and transgression

Cultural criminology focuses on the phenomenological dimension of crime and

crime control, giving special attention to their meanings and roles in power-
relations. Unlike more traditional perspectives, cultural criminology pays ample
attention to the representation of crime and its cultural construction, in which
issues like emotions, risk taking, consumerism, popular culture and media repre‐
sentations of crime in the context of late modern society play key roles. This
implies that they are not only issues of social class, as critical criminologists
would frame it, but also experienced and constituted ‘by affective affiliation, lei‐
sure aesthetics, and collective consumption as by income or employment’ (Ferrell
et al., 2008: 15). From this perspective, cultural criminologists focus on the
dynamics of commodification and criminalization of transgressions and the poli‐
tics of meaning and endeavors among commodified and criminalized subcultures,
social movements or groups. Hence, cultural criminologists consider urban space,
cyberspace and multifunctional spaces as the privileged places of social and cul‐
tural creativity and political transgression.

2 This article is based on data collected from an ongoing ethnographic research project conducted
in São Paulo (Brazil), from September 2013 to July 2014, among pixadores and Brazilian graffiti
artists.

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 From graffiti to pixação

Alison Young (2013: 25) asserts that ‘the city of a public space is more than its
streetscapes, cartography, planning, economy and neighborhoods; it is an image,
a symbol, a mood, an atmosphere and a sensibility’. In this sense, illegal and
transgressive graffiti could be seen as a force opposing the power of architects,
urban planners, real estate brokers and the advertising media, who traditionally
shape the urban landscape.
The interplay between the authorized and non-authorized creation of urban land‐
scapes also underlines a circular process of domination, criminalization, resist‐
ance and oppression, which Mike Presdee saw as both a political and a cultural
process: ‘the political process of the powerful has the ability to make criminals of
us one day and heroes the next’, while the cultural process implies that ‘those
with power come to define and shape dominant forms of social life and give them
specific meanings’ (Presdee, 2000: 16). This dance between power, crime policies
and culture produces a social tension which could be recognized in, for example,
the manifestions of the Spanish Indignados, the Occupy movement, the Taksim
Square Protests in Turkey, the Brazilian Movimento Passe Livre (free fare move‐
ment), the Arab Spring and most recently the Euromaiden in Ukraine.
Although we cannot say that the subculture of illegal graffiti and pixação are
informed by a clear political agenda, their means and ways to resist the authority
of state laws can be situated in the frame of an ‘anarchist criminology’, which
Jeff Ferrell (1998: 9) described ‘as a means of investigating the variety of ways in
which criminal or criminalized behaviors may incorporate repressed dimensions
of human dignity and self-determination, and lived resistance to the authority of
state law.’
Thus, pixação and illegal graffiti writing could be perceived in two ways: it has a
macro-dimension, which refers to the illegitimacy of the political process by
which graffiti writing is framed as criminal behavior, and a micro-dimension
which relates to the opposition of urban control (Ferrell, 1995). Illegal writers
perceive urban space as a free domain - although not in the sense that there are
no rules or ethical codes. On the contrary, living ‘outside of the state’s law’ does
not mean living without any law. In this case, subcultural elements such as style,
technique and brotherhood establish genuine, alternative sets of values and
norms, which structure the interaction among crews of pixadores and guide the
interaction between them and the city authorities and townsfolk. Jonathan Ilan
(2013: 18) suggests that this ‘naughty ability’ to use shared values is a form of
‘street social capital’, i.e. ‘the resources available to individuals through social net‐
works which allow them to thrive within the street field.’
Philippe Bourgois (2010) draws attention to a following stage of this street cul‐
ture, which is the commercialization of oppositional street styles by the media,
the music and film industries and mainstream society. Regarding the process of
commodification and ‘brandfication’ of graffiti by the corporate advertisement
sector, Heitor Alvelos (2004: 184) has announced ‘the death of urban graffiti’ as a
result of an omnipresent mainstream culture, which is no longer appropriating
signs from fringe culture, but is ‘actively generating a physical manifestation of
its own fringes’ (Alvelos, 2004: 185).

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Cultural criminologists like Jeff Ferrell (2008) and Jonathan Ilan (2012) have
demonstrated how close the relationship between crime, transgression, market‐
ing and consumption is. In the words of Mike Presdee (2000: 26): ‘consumption
and communication come together to form the engine room of criminalization.’
By exploring a genealogy of illegal and mainstream graffiti in Brazil, not only as a
successive chain of events, but also as a dual process of commodification and
criminalization with opposite and contradictory aims, I will demonstrate how
these tensions have contributed to the emergence of new forms of urban graffiti.

Conceptualization and special features of pixação and graffiti in Brazil

In order to explain and conceptualize the different Brazilian writing styles and
their criminological meanings, I will now present the elementary notions of urban
writing in Brazil. The above mentioned four different types of urban writing in
Brazil - pichação, pixação, graffiti (and the grapixo style we don’t go into) – differ
in style, purpose, class and legal status.

At the beginning there was pichação with ‘ch’

Pichação with ‘ch’ has its roots in the resistance movements against the Brazilian
dictatorship of the late 1960s. Anonymous messages, inspired by the counter-cul‐
tural movements, such as ‘é proibido proibir’ (it is prohibited to prohibit) or
‘abaixo a ditadura’ (down with the dictatorship) were used as a way to protest
against the military dictatorship which lasted for almost thirty years. The term
pichação ‘refers to a previous technique of painting with a ‘pitch’, which came just
before the spray can. The use of spray cans has led to very distinctive nuanced
tones, which were not possible with a ‘pitch’ technique, that was restricted to
wide black patches, due to the usage of large paint brushes’ (Knauss, 2001: 340).
During the 1970s, the label pichação served to homogenize the diversity and vari‐
ety of writing styles that ranged from political tags against the dictatorship to
random and humorous graffiti: ‘the consequence of this homogenized, confusing
process of Brazilian graffiti, that was inspired by American graffiti, did not
become an autonomous urban expression until the late 1970s and the beginning
of the 1980s’ (Knauss, 2001: 342). A neutralization process of the graffiti subcul‐
ture in Brazil had started in the early 1980s, in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with
public campaigns for a clean city. This was the moment that pichação started to
be associated with grime and crime: ‘the grime of the city caused by graffiti was
lumped together with the issue of aggression against both private and public
property, thus associating graffiti writers with vandalism. In this sense, graffiti
valuation started to be judged in terms of monetary losses and the money spent
on the recovery of those damages, thereby delegitimizing their social critical
approach’ (Knauss, 2001: 343).
This blurry process of the criminalization of pichação on the one hand, and the
subsequent institutionalization and commodification of Brazilian graffiti on the
other, started in the late 1980s and 1990s, reaching its peak at the beginning of
the twenty-first century. While graffiti writers started to move from the streets

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into the art galleries, public campaigns for a clean city were simultaneously
launched. According to Paulo Knauss (2001: 340), this was grounded in the image
of the impurity and dirtiness of pichação. In São Paulo, the Program ‘Clean City’
was clearly launched with the aim of regulating the parameters for advertisement
in the public space, but especially of removing ‘visual pollution’.
While analyzing the connection between graffiti and waste, Alison Young (2014:
53) draws attention to the pejorative imagery produced by common sense
assumptions and the authorities alike: ‘the comparison of the writer with a uri‐
nating animal is repeatedly made’. Those archetypes of waste and dirtiness are
essential to legitimate public campaigns of removal and even criminalization,
thus ‘the graffiti is seen as something out of place, which must be erased in order
to return the social space in its proper condition’ (Young, 2013: 54).
This ambivalent distinction between ‘nice’, artistic graffiti and pichação was an
important stage in the process of the institutionalization and commodification of
graffiti. The media played an important role in the demarcation process of the
boundaries between mainstream graffiti and pichação through ‘three stages of
cultural domination – rejection, domestication and recuperation – those were all
discernible in the media’s portrayal of graffiti, which transferred its focus from
the street to the variety page and television screen’ (Schlecht, 1995: 38).
In fact, the media and the state already declared a war on graffiti in the late 1970s
and 1980s, when newspapers labeled graffiti writers (grafiteiros) as vandals and
bandits. The later development was not so clear: from the early 1990s on, this
binary model actually helped to obscure the portrayal of graffiti as a problem
through a process of cooptation, commercialization and criminalization. As
Neil Schlecht (1995: 37) observes: ‘except for its most radical, marginal elements
Brazilian subculture graffiti was ultimately incorporated and institutionalized by
the controlling culture and its political and social institutions’.
Quite similar to what happened with American graffiti, in which the commodifi‐
cation process started through advertising media (Alvelos, 2004: 181), the co-
optation of an artistic expression that was essentially transgressive in Brazil was
also promoted by the state and the media who clearly divided writers between
pichadores and grafiteiros. At the same time, this process has also generated a
counter-effect, namely a new form of artistic and political expression, leading to
the emergence of pixação with ‘x’.
In Brazil, this creation of a radical difference between graffiti, pichação and pixa‐
ção came from two directions. The first one comes from the legislator who, with
the 9605/98 Act, stated that graffiti is legal if it is allowed by the owner of the
tagged property, and illegal when the tags, writings or drawings are not allowed.
In that latter case it is called pichação which is considered as a crime against the
environment. The second direction from which a new, radical distinction was
made between graffiti, pichação and pixação, was from the subculture itself: it
distinguished pichadores, pixadores and grafiteiros respectively on the basis of spe‐
cific characteristics of their aims, style and technique.
According to Teresa Caldeira (2012: 386), pixação, along with other urban practi‐
ces in São Paulo, requires a new conceptualization of democratic public space and
of the role of ordinary citizens in shaping the city. Despite a lack of consensus

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Paula Gil Larruscahim

– both among scholars and graffiti-writers themselves – about the nature of the
pixação movement, its urban inscriptions (pixações) are now part of the imagetic
repertoire of most urban centers across Brazil. It is a style of graffiti demonstrat‐
ing an art which is essentially transgressive. It openly defies the authorities,
scales walls, sometimes draws attention to the anesthetized glances of the city,
delimits territory and opposes traditional ideas of fine art, by dirtying, drawing,
writing, scratching, tagging, marking and defacing the urban space.

Brazilian mainstream graffiti

In Brazil, the term ‘graffiti’ is currently used for the mainstream and colorful
style, which has its roots in the American graffiti movement of the 1970s. In his
comparison of Brazilian contemporary graffiti with the American graffiti move‐
ment, Paulo Knauss (2001: 335) identifies an irreverence and oppositional atti‐
tude as a main characteristic of graffiti in the late 1960s, with the mural painting
as a tool of social protest within the movement for civil rights. Knauss (2001:
334) uses the example of a mural painted by twenty-one African-American artists
entitled ‘The Wall of Respect’ that was, on the opposite side of the same street,
answered a few months later with a mural called ‘The Wall of Truth’ by the Black
Power movement, who started writing graffiti in 1967 in another street in Chi‐
cago. According to Knauss (2001: 334), ‘other murals such as ‘The Wall of Dignity’
in Detroit have become icons of the American social movement.’ These commun‐
ity murals were painted in the same neighborhoods from which the graffiti move‐
ment emerged, but unlike these original graffiti, the new murals were supported
by federal government sponsorship, which ‘has dispensed millions of dollars
through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (Austin, 2002: 6, 276).
Austin goes further by stating that the ‘final irony may be that writing is alive and
well today, while the “authorized” mural movement has long since faded in all but
a few cities as federal monies supporting it have progressively been cut off’ (Aus‐
tin, 2002: 6).
It was in 1970s New York that the portable spray can made graffiti ‘part of a
larger, dispersed, and ongoing struggle for public space among marginalized
groups in the United States’ (Austin, 2002: 4). Here, the war on graffiti started
with the claim that graffiti was a harmful act, both for its visible ‘pollution’ of
public and private space and for its political dimension. Hitherto, ‘style, form, and
methodology, major concerns of most writers, were secondary in significance to
the prime directive in graffiti: getting up’ (Castleman, 1982: 19). The notion of
‘getting up’ is derived from the act of jumping on a train to set a tag; a classical
graffiti style in 1970s New York.
Despite the fact that Brazilian and American graffiti styles are very different, the
process of neutralization and commodification occurred in a similar way: the
state, with the help of the media, ‘reshaped a marginal cultural manifestation by
promoting its acceptability as aesthetic and commodity’ (Schlecht, 1995: 38). ‘The
media were the primary vehicle in the process of labeling and redefining graffiti,
first as deviant, later as an enigmatic and exotic, yet harmless expression, and
finally as an acceptable commercial expression of the dominant culture’ (Schlecht,
1995: 38).

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Many Brazilian graffiti writers became famous with exhibitions around the world,
as for example the ‘Paulistana Old School’, formed by Binho, Tinho, Speto, Vitché
and Os Gêmeos. This old school was influenced by the hip-hop movement, which
was introduced in Brazil during the 1980s (Medeiros, 2013). As its style is usually
colorful and has attractive patterns, it is more tolerated by society and better
accepted by public opinion than pixação.
Following a global tendency, we can argue that Brazilian mainstream graffiti is
becoming part of a movement known as the ‘rebirth of Muralism in contempo‐
rary urban art’. According to Jens Besser (2010: 14), the issue of legality or illegal‐
ity is of secondary importance, since ‘the new muralism wants not so much to
realize a clear, dictated goal of cultural education; it is rather an expression of
human culture and a tradition which goes all the way back to those who decorated
their environment with cave paintings as early was the Stone Age.’
As a way to fight pixação, Brazilian graffiti has also got state support through the
creation of legal writing places and public and media campaigns, such as the ‘Graf‐
fiti Cup’ in Rio de Janeiro and current projects including ‘Pichação is crime,
denounce’ (Curitiba), ‘Hot-call Pichação’ (Porto Alegre), ‘Respect for Belo Hori‐
zonte’ and ‘Clean City’ (São Paulo). One of the strategies municipalities, schools
and property owners used to prevent pixações is to hire and pay graffiti writers to
paint murals across the city.

5. Promoting citizenship, valuate and preserve the public property

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Paula Gil Larruscahim

This does not mean that Brazilian mainstream graffiti cannot have a political and
defiant content; it is completely free from any censorship. A vivid example is a
graffiti painted by Os Gêmeos in a flyover in São Paulo in 2013. It contained the
message that the city council should stop spending its money cleaning graffiti,
because Brazilian cities have much more serious issues to deal with. After
two days, however, the council hall of São Paulo erased it.
The dynamics of co-optation, commodification and neutralization of the trans‐
gressive and political element of graffiti in Brazil coincides with the gentrification
of urban centers in, for example, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, São Paulo and
Curitiba. At the same time that the Brazilian authorities fight against pichação
and some other illegal graffiti, neighborhoods such Vila Madalena in São Paulo,
an area that has been invaded by the real estate market, uses graffiti as a touristic
selling point. ‘Beco do Batman’ is an alley in Vila Madalena that is filled with graf‐
fiti pieced together by famous urban artists and thus, a hotspot for those who
seek to breath the cool air of transgression in a relatively safe urban environment:

6. Billboard setting directions to ‘Beco do Batman’, Vila Madalena, São Paulo

7. Tourists sightseeing around Beco do Batman, Vila Madalena, São Paulo

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Pixação with ‘x’

Next to the commodification and neutralization process of Brazilian graffiti, we
can observe a parallel process, which is the criminalization and demonization of
pixação. The word pixação came from pixo, which means pitch or tar; the dark vis‐
cous mixture obtained by the distillation of wood, coal, peat, etc.
According to Jeff Ferrell (1996: 166), ‘an understanding of behavior labeled as
deviant or criminal must evolve from a close examination of its actual practice’.
Ferrell argues that ‘beyond some sort of voyeuristic pleasure’, details such as the
brand of graffiti spray or the way graffiti writers negotiate the design of an illegal
piece matter ‘because they constitute the experimental setting of deviance and
criminality, the immediate, interactional dynamic through which criminals con‐
struct crime’ (Ferrell, 1996: 166). In the Brazilian case, these elements are essen‐
tial in understanding the emergence of new subcultures such as pixação. Pixação
has different characteristics, techniques, aesthetics, as well as political and social
approaches than other graffiti styles, and pixação writers also have different
motives.

8. ‘Opus 666 e Shapas’, straight tag (pixo reto), São Paulo city centre

In São Paulo, the resistance against an increased control over urban space is
directly connected to the issue of spatial segregation and the privatization of the
public domain (Caldeira: 380). However, pixação is not framed in the classical way
as a form of resistance to power and control, for it implies a micro-politics of
everyday life and an existential rupture through the joy and the experience of

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being in the city (Mittmann, 2013: 63). Therefore, it is ‘seen as something out of
place, which must be erased in order to return the social space to its proper condi‐
tion’ (Young, 2013: 53).
By looking at the meaning people give to their everyday life in relation to leisure-
activities, Ruth Penfold-Mounce (2009: 4) argues that ‘the joy of transgressing
boundaries through crime and deviance necessitates consideration of why and
how pleasure occurs through illicit activities’. In this sense, pixação appears to be
a ‘ludic form of resistance’: though it is aggressive and defiant, its practice pro‐
vides a deep sense of pleasure and amusement.
Pixação with an ‘x’ started in São Paulo during the 1980s when pixadores from
different suburbs and peripheries of the city started to arrange their meetings in
specific areas, so-called points, and organize themselves in groups or crews (tur‐
mas e gangues) to promote their logos (grifes) and signatures throughout the city.
Since the end of the 1990s, there are about four different ‘points’ of pixação. The
idea of a ‘point’ is to congregate pixadores from the different peripheries of the
city, and indeed the whole country, in order to exchange folhinhas (sketchbooks
and fanzines of pixação), share experiences and circulate from one part of the city
(and the country) to another, setting their pixo, logo and crew-signature through‐
out the city. At present, the main ‘point’ in São Paulo is located at the city centre.
In the 1990s, there was much competition, violence and disputes amongst pixa‐
dores, but since the beginning of the twenty-first century pixação has become a
more peaceful movement. The internal disputes seem to be over and they are,
politically, a more structured as a group. This new phase of pixação can be
explained by recent interventions from within the pixação movement, called ata‐
ques (attacks) and atropelos (trampling). As opposed to the performances of the
pixações during ludic tours around the city in the 1990s, the attacks always have
a prior organization and a political reason.
The first attack took place in 2008 in the Faculty of Fine Arts in the University of
São Paulo. The aim of this attack was to promote a discussion about contempo‐
rary art. The action was organized by a group of pixadores and consisted of an
occupation of the faculty building. They ‘tagged’ the building as much as they
could, but targeted especially the area reserved for the presentation of the final
theses. As a result of the attack, a student was arrested and lost his right to grad‐
uate.
The latest political attack occurred in October 2013 and was performed by an
anonymous pixador against a historical monument at Ibirapuera Park in São
Paulo. The aim of this attack was to promote a discussion about the archetypes of
Brazil’s historical heroes. The target of the attack was the Bandeiras monument.
This is a sculpture commissioned by São Paulo government in 1921 to Victor Bre‐
cheret, in order to symbolize the sixteenth century expeditions of the Portuguese
army: Os Bandeirantes. In his description of the monument, which ‘consists of a
long canoe being pulled by two men on horses and pushed by a group of African
slaves and indigenous people’, the sociologist Sérgio Franco (2014: 120) draws
attention to the fact that ‘Brecheret removed any trace of the dramatic content
that death brings. The Portuguese lead the group, the indigenous people are por‐
trayed as slaves and, to their disgrace, they are chained’. The monument, in fact,

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represents how oppressive and devastating the history of invasion and the coloni‐
zation of Brazil was. According to Franco (2014: 121), ‘the sculptor’s work did not
represent any revolution’. The attack to Brecheret’s monument was both a means
to draw attention to a voting process about a new law on indigenous land, and an
attempt to reframe Brazilian historical symbols and what could be considered a
piece of art.

9. The Bandeiras Monument pixado: No to PEC 215 and Bandeirantes assassins!

10. The Bandeiras Monument pixado: No to PEC 215 and Bandeirantes assassins!

Atropelo is a similar practice to what Jeff Ferrell (1996: 87) writes about graffiti
writers in Denver, who had been writing over other tags, pieces or indeed over
another pixação or graffiti. The slang used in this respect is ‘going over’. It is a
serious infraction, because one of the ethical standards within the graffiti subcul‐
ture is to never ‘go over’ someone else’s work. A famous ‘atropelo’ took place in

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Paula Gil Larruscahim

2010 when graffiti artists Os Gêmeos, Nunca, Nina Pandolfo had their mural
trampled. The motivation was to draw attention to the high costs of their mural,
commissioned by the municipality, whilst very basic needs in the peripheries,
such as housing, sanitation and health are not provided by the authorities.

Pixação, criminalization, art and resistance

‘Order (and therefore disorder) is a cultural phenomenon that art challenges

and, by doing so, itself becomes criminalized. Order is the destruction of art
and art the destruction of order.’ (Mike Presdee)

The relation between art and transgression, especially with respect to contempo‐
rary art, is underpinned by a constant tension between denial and adaptation.
Whilst a transgressive artistic act rejects conventional patterns, it reaffirms a
given social and cultural order at the same time.
After the first attack at the Biennial of Fine Art in São Paulo in 2008, pixadores
were officially invited to participate in the following exhibition in 2010. This
could be seen as the first step toward the cooptation of pixação, but then we
would have to disregard the irreverent character of their participation. Apart
from the exhibition of folhinhas (sketchbooks and fanzines of pixação), an unex‐
pected intervention took place: an attack on the installation ‘White Flag’ of the
artist Nuno Ramos. Azevedo (2011) described it as a ‘sinister work’, ‘consisting of
three giant conical mounds made of black sand and marble, it featured loudspeak‐
ers that emit a dim hum of samba music and three live vultures in a mesh cage.
The birds would stand still for long stretches, resembling their taxidermy cousins,
then startle spectators by taking flight’.
The attack of the installation was orchestrated by Djan Ivson, an artist and pixa‐
dor, who trespassed the net separating the birds from the public and tagged: ‘Free
the Vultures’. The symbolic act did not only serve to start a discussion on the poli‐
tics of art, but also to remind people of and protest against the imprisonment of a
group of pixadores in the city of Belo Horizonte, in the province of Minas Gerais,
who were accused of ‘gang crime’. The phrase was a metaphor, comparing the vul‐
tures of the installation to pixadores and pointing at the contradiction that some
pixadores were being recognized as artists at the biennial, whereas others were
arrested for gang crime and conspiracy.
Regarding the dynamics and parameters of what is considered art, Taylor (2013:
32) reminds us that ‘the process involved, in art, is not one of a sifting by experts,
but one of innumerable social arrangements interacting with each other’. Thus,
pixação goes beyond a criminalized subculture and operates as a disruptive and
unsetting mechanism against this social and cultural order. As suggested by
Presdee, if order is a cultural phenomenon that is challenged by art, apart from
any institutional recognition, pixação is possibly a new and inventive form of
transgression.

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Conclusion

Since 2011, graffiti is no longer considered a crime in Brazil if it is authorized by

the owner of a building, be it for advertisement or purely for adornment. Instead,
public campaigns attempt to turn graffiti into something joyful and peaceful,
which is adapted to the aesthetic standards of public policies that aim at the
transformation of urban centers into clean, homogenous areas with a minimal
circulation of ordinary people. This is done through the suppression and neutrali‐
zation of the transgressive elements of graffiti and street art, such as challenge,
irreverence, protest and subversion.
The way the style defined as pichação is treated stands in sharp contrast with this
process of commodification and neutralization. Pichação has got a fundamentally
pejorative meaning and has been marginalized and criminalized. This dual and
apparently contradictory process of commodification and criminalization has
contributed to the emergence of new forms of urban graffiti. On the one hand,
there is the non-recognition of state laws, which is particularly apparent among
pixadores, for whom a ‘politics of vandalism’ is an essential element of their
(life)style; they will never accept the institutionalization or sponsorship of pixa‐
ção. On the other hand, we can observe a blurring of the boundaries, not only
between graffiti and pixação, but also between illegality and transgression.
Despite the fact that Brazilian graffiti has been commodified and recognized as
art, its content still contains critical political messages.

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