Metagraffiti ? Graffiti Art and the Urban Image in Latin America

Focusing on graffiti scenes from São Paulo and Santiago in Chile, this innovative visual ethnography examines diverse forms of self-reference and metareference that appear in Latin American graffiti art. Chandra Morrison Ariyo works across multiple scales of contemporary graffiti production—from tags to massive murals—to show how painting the city enables individuals to reimagine their own position within the material and social structures around them. Metagraffitti reveals how practitioners such as Tinho, OSGEMEOS, Grin, and Bisy use metagraffiti features to influence public perceptions about this art form and its effect on the urban environment. Ultimately, Metagraffiti proposes a novel conceptual framework that highlights graffiti’s ability to forge alternative forms of movement, sociality, and value within Latin American cityscapes. These urban images invite us to imagine what the city could be, when seen as a site for action and imagination.

"Metagraffiti is beautifully written, conceptually powerful, and empirically nuanced, offering the idea of 'metagraffiti' as a frame to understand the many discourses about graffiti’s multiple functions, representations, and ongoing evolution in Latin America and the world. This book is an excellent resource for research and teaching around graffiti, the urban image, and forms of voicing. The specificity with which Morrison Ariyo attends to the form, process, and function of graffiti is impressive and will energize future scholarship. I highly recommend this text."