Cidade Cinza.

Here’s an essential bit of viewing about São Paulo, a documentary (with English subs on request and great establishing shots to show what the place really looks like) about why the city has become such a fertile source for graffiti. I can’t wait to see it as I recently read a fascinating extended interview with Brazil’s most famous graffiti artists, Os Gemeos, in Trip magazine (No. 223), where they echoed a lot of these points. Their main contention was that the walls and streets of São Paulo have become the locus of a conflict between the people who live here from day to day, who want their city to be a place where colour and vision are permitted to alleviate the unrelenting waves of concrete, and those institutional and political forces that rule the city from above (often quite literally, with their exclusive penthouses and private helicopters), who seek to suppress the anarchic offshoots of a supposedly degenerate sub-culture. 

Here's the trailer:

One of the intersting things I noticed watching the trailer is how São Paulo’s popular nickname cidade cinza (‘grey city’ or, more imaginatively, ‘city of ash’) has been appropriated by the graffiti artists. Playing on the authorities’ tendency to spray over their work with grey paint and return the city to its pristine blankness, cidade cinza is now a popular slogan of the graffiti artists, part term of endearment (like 'dirty old town' was for London), part rallying cry against the systemic inequality that manifests itself in rich assholes wantonly destroying acts of free cultural expression. From this perspective, the walls are not just the site of a conflict, but something more organic, the neurons and synapses of a vast consciousness upon which strange worlds and parallel cities bloom and then vanish, staying on only as trace elements, flickering outlines in the composite memory of the millions who saw them.

Os Gemeos: 'Your money turns it grey!'Why bother to keep painting, then, if their work only survives in this transient, disembodied form? Why bother when the doc shows us the municipal employees charged with removing the graffiti, and even a bit of footage of some guy in a boilersuit spraying over one of Os Gemeos' works? After all, the twins could easily give up on SP and go to New York or London, where they could mount vast exhibitions and sell their work for millions upon millions of dollars.

Os Gemeos: 'Mr Mayor: To remove art is to remove culture. To remove culture is to disrespect the people.'I suspect the reason they don’t comes back to that interview in Trip. There they made a categorical distinction between graffiti and art. Acknowledging that both types of work are informed by the same seminal influences and techniques, they were nonetheless adamant that they’d keep doing graffiti, and keep doing it in São Paulo. The interview made clear that they love the city, even as they despair of it, and I imagine that graffiti therefore has something of the value of a performative act not merely for Os Gemeos but for many of these artists. Transforming the image of the city by painting its walls draws a line, however ephemerally, between the different interpretations of the city and the different tribes who both ascribe to and propagate them. It visibly repudiates the notion that the world we see while stuck in traffic or walking the pavement is the property of the city’s owners and politicians.

Os Gemeos: 'Under a grey wall...there exists a love for this city.'Who knows, it might even be the case that São Paulo’s graffiti artists keep painting not merely in spite of the authorities destroying their work, but because of it: they keep painting to remind everyone else where the fault lines that are otherwise invisible or actively obscured really lie.

Here to have the last word are Os Gemeos, talking about why they continue to live and work here in SP:

‘One of the coolest things here is that there’s no beach. That forces people to find other types of waves. And learn how to surf them every day.’ (‘Uma das coisas mais legais daqui é que não tem praia. Faz a gente pegar outros tipos de onda. E aprender surfar nelas, todo dia.')

Os Gemeos: 'Do you prefer grey? Nor us.'