"I would rather you hate me than ignore me."

I've always kind of considered pixicao, the uniquely Paulista (Sao Paulo) tradition of tagging, more of a sport than an art - like a sport-art hybrid, or creative/expressive sport akin to skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding. Pixicao rightly gets little attention from the street art or graff world at large because it has never really been about art. Scripts and concepts have barely evolved over the years. Pixicao isn’t about what you write or how you write it, it's about where you write it and what you had to do to get there. Pixadores are constantly re-interpreting their environment and imagining new possibilities for it. That's why I dig this mini-vid from coolhunting - it doesn't patronize pixicao as an art, but shows it more as a game of contestation with social implications: a competition between writers, crews, and security forces. The video-game-like background music is perfect compliment.

The context from which pixicao emerged is telling also. Sao Paulo is a city of great disparity, split between the largely invisible favela dwelling mass and the wealthy, many commuting from peripheral gated communities to the downtown in helicopters (SP has the most private helicopters in the world). It’s become a secured city with an immense amount of gated and controlled-access space. Pixicao, is an emphatic statement of existence and a negation of such control – a contestation of space and an assertion of voice, agency, identity, and access. It's universal message is simple: "I exist, and fences and cameras cannot contain me." The take-away for me, is that the problem isn't graffiti, it is much larger.