Papers by Vittorio Parisi
Interfaces, 2023
The history of Italian street art appears to be ingrained in interstitial architectures such as e... more The history of Italian street art appears to be ingrained in interstitial architectures such as empty lots or abandoned and unfinished buildings, ruins in which since the late 1990s a new generation of outsider artists coming from graffiti writing have been developing new unsanctioned forms of muralism, based on science-fictional, fantasy, and horrific representations and imageries. This article aims therefore to revisit the history and aesthetics of Italian graffiti writing and street art through the prism of British philosopher Mark Fisher’s concept of the weird, by questioning the aesthetic, socio-anthropological, and critical interaction between street artworks and ruins: what role have ruins played in the development of graffiti writing and street art in Italy? And how, in return, have graffiti writing and street art transformed the aesthetic experience of ruins?
TAG: name writing in public space. A reader of the 2017 conference about tagging at Freie Universität Berlin, 2022
Once illegally sprayed on any surface in the urban environment, tags act indistinctly on private ... more Once illegally sprayed on any surface in the urban environment, tags act indistinctly on private and public property, by defacing and tarnishing it. Most importantly, such illicit signs enter into competition with many other legitimate and prescriptive signs like billboards, traffic signs, or election posters. New York artist RAMM:ELL:ZEE (1960-2010) was the first graffiti writer who recognized and theorized the political implications of tags in such a war of the signs. This allows us not only to call him a key figure in the history of graffiti, but also to include that specific history in a more extensive one: in spite of its apparent literary meaninglessness, graffiti writing should be interpreted as part of a war in which – from Futurism to Structuralism – letters have been released from their exchange value, then used against the oppressive nature of language.
Lo Squaderno n. 54, 2019
Resulting from the global urbanization of territories under neoliberalism, urban interstices may ... more Resulting from the global urbanization of territories under neoliberalism, urban interstices may appear as one of the most “hauntological” landscapes of our time, for their state of neglect and disuse seems to prefigurate what the ruins of our own cities will look like. Although occurring in many conformations – as leftover spaces like vacant lots or abandoned buildings, as infrastructural spaces like viaducts and underpasses, etc. – urban interstices seem to be characterized by the constant presence of three elements: garbage, weeds and illegal graffiti. All three are commonly linked to the idea of urban decay, yet the latter two seem to exist in a living and conflictual interaction with the built environment, for both the natural and creative invasion of space act as forms of reappropriation and resistance to pre-existing architecture. Spontaneous plants reestablish their domain over the ubiquitous architectural space, whereas illegal graffiti act as a claim for autonomous creative space, in a social context where art only exists as a mediated, institutionalized phenomenon. From this perspective, both weeds and illegal graffiti play a role of invasive, parasitic and haunting agents, engendering what will hereby be called an aesthetics of infestation. By causing an “obsolescence of space” (Lefebvre) and by subverting the common hierarchies of ornamentation, the infesthetic agency of weeds and illegal graffiti gives back to the urban its lost dimension of oeuvre.
Hispanismes, 2019
Resulting from global urbanization and a process of exploitation and abandonment of territories u... more Resulting from global urbanization and a process of exploitation and abandonment of territories under late capitalism, urban interstices seem to foreshadow the appearance of our own cities as future ruins. In addition, the constant presence of three elements seems to haunt interstices : generic waste, spontaneous plants and illegal graffiti. Usually associated with a process of urban degradation, the plants and the graffiti nevertheless seem to share a common force or, to say it with Henri Bergson, the same "vital impetus" : an incessant impulse to creation, bringing all living beings without exception to seize and transform each piece of matter and space on their way. This impetus takes the form of a creative invasion of space, an "aesthetic of infestation" through which both vegetation and graffiti writers reclaim the built environment as their own space. As a result, the vacant lot is an opportunity for the contemporary city to become once again, as Henri Lefebvre recommended, the ephemeral and perpetual work of its inhabitants.
Framing Graffiti & Street Art, 2019
Native to the urban non-places as a spontaneous, conflictual and ephemeral creative practice, gra... more Native to the urban non-places as a spontaneous, conflictual and ephemeral creative practice, graffiti writing has been almost immediately recuperated by the institutional artworld and the cultural industry. In most cases, such a paradigm shift from non-places to institutional places goes along with graffiti’s musealization and commodification, something Adorno called Entkunstung (“deartification”). Nevertheless, it may also result in a critical redefinition of graffiti’s aesthetic limits and possibilities. Such is the case of French graffiti writer and visual artist MOSA/Alexandre Bavard’s work Neo-Archeologia, in which graffiti writing no longer exists under its usual forms, but is transfigured into a body of sculptural works that succeed in holding a trace of graffiti’s former, conflictual ethos. In order to analyze such work, I shall make use of the Derridean concept of hauntology: while conceived for the white cube, and while looking nothing like graffiti, Neo-Archeologia is nonetheless haunted by the “ghost” of non-places, which used to define graffiti writing’s original ethos.
Fin de siècle : fin de l'art ? Destins de l'art dans les discours de la fin des XIXe et XXe siècles, 2018
Entre la fin du XXe siècle et les premières années du XXIe, le street art et le graffiti writing ... more Entre la fin du XXe siècle et les premières années du XXIe, le street art et le graffiti writing se sont développés d’une façon telle qu'aujourd'hui, ils ne nous apparaissent plus comme des pratiques indépendantes, spontanées, contre-culturelles, exclusivement routières, géographiquement délimitées, faites à la bombe ou au feutre et principalement relevants d’une esthétique pop : il s’agit de pratique globales, impliquant un éventail presque omni-compréhensif de techniques, médiums, sujets et styles. Surtout, ces deux phénomènes ont fait l’objet de plusieurs formes de reconnaissance : de la part d’institutions artistiques, du marché de l’art, d’administrations citoyennes, de l’université. Selon une lecture hegelo-dantienne, le street art et le graffiti writing auraientt donc et désormais épuisé leurs véritables prémisses, esthétiques et idéologiques, ainsi subissant une métamorphose au cadrage difficile. En raison de tout cela, dans cet article nous nous interrogeons sur la « fin » du street art et du graffiti writing, et pour y répondre, nous allons observer trois cas d’étude : l’analyse du tableau The Death of Graffiti peint par Lady Pink en 1982, la suspension du festival italien de street art FAME en 2012, l’auto-censure de l’artiste Blu à Berlin en 2014 et à Bologne en 2016.
Ridiculosa, 2017
In this article I focus on the work and the practice of Blu, an Italian artist whose artistic pro... more In this article I focus on the work and the practice of Blu, an Italian artist whose artistic process consists of the production of monumental mural paintings that are marked by humanist, environmentalist and anti-globalization subjects that are close to libertarian culture. Because of the public nature of all his work, which is thus highly polemical and satirical, the artist’s activity has been at the centre of three episodes of censorship that will be analyzed here: Modena in 2004, Los Angeles in 2010 and Rome 2014. Forces of public order had effectively erased representations that were held to be immoral, disturbing or outrageous. However, on two other occasions Blu himself decided to erase his own creations: in Berlin (2014), he wanted to avoid having his murals contribute to the ongoing gentrification of the Kreuzberg neighbourhood; in Bologna (2016), he wanted to protest the museification of eight mural paintings that had been detached and transposed on canvas. Faced with the “artification” of street art and its subsequent “de-artisation” – in other words, the loss of its original critical force – Blu appropriated censorship methods normally used by institutions in order to withdraw from what would otherwise have been an inevitable process of recuperation. Can we see, in this auto-iconoclasm, an evolution of satirical language?
The polymorphic phenomenon commonly known as « street art » is an evident outcome of the pluralis... more The polymorphic phenomenon commonly known as « street art » is an evident outcome of the pluralist and post-historical era of art. During the last ten years, it evolved in a way so we can no longer consider it as an isolated practice, characterized by independency and illegality ; exclusively linked with a specific environment (the street), a geographic area or a specific media (the spraycan and the marker), nor it can be seen anymore as the expression of a pop aesthetics and culture. « Street art » has become a global practice, implying a wide range of techniques, media, styles and contents. Above all, it has gained several forms of recognition, coming from art institutions and market, city councils and the academic world. The present paper aims to propose a Danto-Hegelian interpretation of « street art », according to which the phenomenon might have exhausted (if not « betrayed ») its true aesthetic and ideological premises, thus going through a hardly definable metamorphosis.
This divulgative paper has been published as a booklet in the "Mémoire et patrimoine - Parcours d... more This divulgative paper has been published as a booklet in the "Mémoire et patrimoine - Parcours d'architecture" series of the City of Pantin. It is the result of a fieldwork consisting in the observation of the coexistence of both illegal and authorized/institutional graffiti and street art in Pantin, in the north-east side of Paris' suburb.
In this paper I explore the intersection between urban creativity and gender studies, through a c... more In this paper I explore the intersection between urban creativity and gender studies, through a composite methodology and with a double purpose: to examine the role and the recognition of women in the graffiti and street art milieu; and to test the existence, the extent, and the quality of gender biases in the eye of the observer. In order to accomplish these two tasks, I examined existing literature treating the subject and created a visual survey. Observations and results from each step of the present work reveal a general lack of recognition of women’s role in street art and graffiti, as well as a remarkable amount of gender preconceptions during mere aesthetic appreciation of urban works of art.
Editing by Vittorio Parisi
Framing Graffiti & Street Art, 2019
Proceedings of Nice Street Art Project,
International Conferences, 2017 - 2018
Editor: Edwige Com... more Proceedings of Nice Street Art Project,
International Conferences, 2017 - 2018
Editor: Edwige Comoy Fusaro
Journal Issues by Vittorio Parisi
Books by Vittorio Parisi
Banlieue-Banlieue. Pionniers de l'art urbain, 2017
Extrait du livre "Banlieue-Banlieue. Pionniers de l'art urbain", Paris, Éditions Hartpon, 2017
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Papers by Vittorio Parisi
Editing by Vittorio Parisi
International Conferences, 2017 - 2018
Editor: Edwige Comoy Fusaro
Journal Issues by Vittorio Parisi
Books by Vittorio Parisi
International Conferences, 2017 - 2018
Editor: Edwige Comoy Fusaro