Representation and Reconstruction of Memories and Visual Subculture

A Documentary Strategy about Graffiti Writing

Abstract

Graffiti Writing, a visual movement engaged in the Hip Hop subculture, spread globally over the past decades as creative manifestation and public statement for its urban artists, and with controversy about the public domain value of this artistic visual language. Despite the large amount of material documenting it, such as films, documentaries, magazines and books, it remains a marginal subculture, little known by large audiences, in its less-known characteristics. The following communication presents a work-in-progress practice-based research, whose objective is to investigate and connect the contribution of animation to the documentation and communication of this subculture of graffiti Writing, deciphering its interpretation for uninformed audiences about it. This is accomplished by a documentary fieldwork, with testimonies and memories emerged in interviews to artists and activists from the graffiti Writing movement that are active in different approaches, surfaces and styles. This fieldwork is conducted as a mediation interface, focused in this stage of the research in the province of Ferrara, in Northern Italy. The documentary work is developed with representation strategies and narrative reconstruction for the disclosure of this graphic subculture in a specific geographical context. This is accomplished with the development of an animated documentary short film. With it, a documentary strategy for the representation and reconstruction of graffiti Writing memories is devised. This option allows the exploration of new concepts with the encounter of two distinct visual arts and mediatic approaches, namely urban art and animation, simultaneously allowing the definition of an authorial language appropriate to the project and its theme.