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São Paulo, the most metropolitan and cosmopolitan city in South America, with about 18 million inhabitants and immigrants from more than 196 different countries, refuses to be drowned by the gray of concrete and asphalt. Graffiti began to appear everywhere as proof that the urban creatures that inhabit this city are not resigned to hiding the motley chromatic range that they carry in their cultural genes.
The epicenter of this earthquake of shapes and colors is located in the Pinheiros neighborhood, specifically in Vila Madalena. There, as if by a magic, O beco do Batman appeared: the houses of the neighbors, the garage doors, the walls and even the light posts, the sidewalks and the asphalt are decorated in a madness of colors.
Another place dedicated to graffiti is Cruzeiro do Sul avenue, which today is considered the first Open Museum of Urban Art (MAAU) in the world, a governmental initiative of 2011. However, a few years earlier, in São Paulo, the Clean City Act was enforced. On the one hand, the authorities erase, covering with gray paint many of the walls painted, on the other, graffiti artists paint them again.
The paulistanos do not forget how all the colors of a great wall in the 23 de Maio Avenue were extinguished with gray paint in 2008. They were covered with graffitis made in 2002. After much protest, the wall was repainted. At present 23 de Maio Avenue exhibits more than 15 thousand square meters of works of about 200 artists who expressed themselves and protested...
So now you know: if you are going to visit the mega metropolis of Brazil observe the city from another perspective: like the one of its graffiti...