Pixaçao

Pixaçao is a uniquely Brazilian style of street art, akin to graffiti, which is prevalent primarily in São Paulo. The style is only used for quick tags. There are no throw-ups, no pieces, no burners and no murals. The goal is to get you and your crew's name up in as many places as possible. Anyway enough about the style here's an intro to it:

And some images:

The quick tag nature of this urban art should be contrasted with the tags of American graffiti, like this:

For Pixadores (the writers) the best Pixacao is the one on the highest and hardest to get to spot. Working within the urban environment of Sao Paulo this leads to many tags on the tops of tall apartment buildings. In this video you can see Pixadores nearly falling to certain death as they climb a building to write:

The writers hail primarily from Sao Paulo's slums, located primarily on the city's peripheries.

Pixacao is also a historically parallel phenomenon to American graffiti in that it exploded on the scene independently but resulted in a similar vein of artistic expression.

There is also a rebellious, insurrectionary, destructive, punk mentality to Pixacao that differs even from Graffiti. This became blatantly obvious in an event earlier this year. At a gallery for "underground" and "street art" in Sao Paulo a crew of Pixadores invaded the space and taged the place up.

They left a letter...

...which reads as follows:

"The Path to Revolution

We are going to invade this shitty art gallery, which claims to give space to underground artist - in which case it's all ours anyways - and we will declare total protest."

The letter also includes the slogans:

"Long live Pixacao"

"Art as Crime"

"Crime as Art"

"All for the Pixacao Movement"

The role graffiti played in New York City in the late '70's and early '80's in bringing attention to the city's disenfranchised has become even more true of the Pixaçao movement. Sao Paulo's poor and marginalized are more disenfranchised and frankly ignored than even the worst-off South Bronx residents of the era. Their art then becomes a means of attracting attention in a society which constantly ignores them, and pretends they don't exist. Their social standing within Brazilian society and, more than that, their existence is made evident by these tags. They want to be noticed, and to do so tag in the highest of buildings and most stunning and difficult to reach places within their urban environment. As a man in one of the videos above says, "I would rather you hate me than ignore me." The spirit of the pioneering days of Graffiti, and the famous motto (from the movie Style Wars), "Bomb (to paint graffiti) the System" seem to live on in Pixacao.

"O pixador, o bandido...que estraga, que destroi, todo esses sao filhos do maligno," (The pixador, the bandit, those who wreck, who destroy, all of these are sons of the malign [nature of our society]) says another man in the second video. It is this mentality which the pixadores embody. A result of a rotten system, they aim to destroy the society which created them and has left them marginalized.