Signature, Body & Architecture: Pixação em São Paulo 1985?2000

François Chastanet

During the nineties, São Paulo, fifth worldwide rank brazilian agglomeration with 20 million inhabitants, has been totally invaded by an all-over writing phenomenon called ?pixação? (?tags? in Brazilian) that largely surpassed in terms of quantity any other graffiti situations. These illegal ornamental letterings, mainly signatures of vivid formal innovation, introduced a break in the history of contemporary graffiti since the New York explosion in the seventies. The São Paulo scene, which represents a unique moment in the worldwide spreading process of tags, doesn?t reproduce with more or less alteration the New York development of letter shapes (which is what most other scenes from American, European and Asian metropolis are doing), by using a different imaginary and a totally new approach based on the integration of the structure of the letter into an urban context, here used in its whole as a medium surface.

Non-stop ephemeral writings against continuous erasing define the urban game: temporary letters are built for precise places under special circumstances, where time plays a major role in the design of the letterform. As an alternative contextual design and as an expression of the consequences of specific urban conditions on the drawing of letters, tags are analysed here from a calligraphic viewpoint, introducing the idea of ?writing tactics? in the visual environment: moments of ruse playing with surveillance and with the specificities of the medium, here the architectural object.

The structure of these signatures is on one side connected to the relation between the potential of the human body and the architectural rhythm of façades, and on the other side represents a genuine calligraphic example of vernacular adaptation of historical types & letterforms (notably black letter, runic & Etruscan scripts) to an urban utilization context, the predominant writing tool being here a simple paint roller. The spacing of letters links this phenomenon, extraordinarily homogeneous in terms of style, much more to the typographic and lettering fields than to the usual ?continuous stroke? signature that can mainly describes most tags produced by spray can in the occidental-influenced world.

How can difference still be produced in such architectural environments devoid of quality as those that constitute São Paulo or Mexico?s urban sprawls? Parallel identity constructions recently appeared in contemporary metropolis (such as Los Angeles) and have been recognised and spread through packaging, mostly record sleeves nowadays. This research explores the emergence of graphic cultural identities,the role of illegal letterforms in megapolis contexts and the extent of the contextualisation of signs in sub-cultural globalization. The observed ?pixação? lettering system can be seen as one of the consequences of actual global urban conditions on the drawing style of latin letterforms; an unexpected evolution of the latin alphabet.

For more information and images please visit the downloads section of http://www.lpdme.org, two large scale posters are available.

François Chastanet published an article about pixação in Eye 56, summer 2005. See http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=123&fid=540.