Graffiti Art in Grajaú, São Paulo

I was really impressed with my brief visit to Grajaú, a neighborhood in lower São Paulo. It is about forty minutes away from where my family lives, but seems to be in a whole different time zone, unlike all other São Paulo regions I have been to. The distribution of buildings, the width of streets, the mixture of nature with asphalt, the names of shops – all seem different.

Grajaú is a very poor neighborhood in a big city, and faces all the grave problems deriving from that. The illegal drug market controls the social and political scenarios and has children exposed to violence and crime at very early age.

Notwithstanding, there is a sense of cooperation and of “working as part of a community” in the atmosphere. The community members seem to have found creative ways to deal with their difficulties and the best example is in the graffiti art on the streets. That is what calls the most attention to the neighborhood: there are almost no empty walls in Grajaú, they are all canvases for beautiful and very expressive graffiti drawings.

A group of young boys, some working closely with CEDECA-Interlagos (Yves de Roussan Defense Center for Children and Adolescents Interlagos), actually hold workshops to initiate children and teenagers on graffiti art. They have created a “graffiti culture” and are references not only in Grajaú, but in all of São Paulo.

The artists from Grajaú chose a small street, with no pavement and close to the neighborhood’s public school, to tell the community’s story through drawings. They’ve collected tales and proverbs from the elders that first came to Grajaú and exposed everything through graffiti on a sequence of houses. This permanent art exhibition is on a place called Morro da Macumba and there are pictures on: http://freedimensional.ning.com/photo/album/show?id=2533896%3AAlbum%3A7303&page=2