8. Voices of Graffiti in Urban Settings: Symbolic Contestation and Political Narratives

Graffiti is one of the most powerful visual expressions of symbolic contestation in urban settings. The 2008–9 financial crisis in Europe, and resultant austerity measures, gave voice to renewed public protests with specific cultural responses and political narratives. In this process, graffiti is clearly eminently political. The occupy movement as a transnational and urban attitude of political activism became vital to support alternative visions to dominant politics and at the same time to debate national pathways for coping with the crisis and to participate beyond the traditional mechanisms of representative democracy. Public spaces in urban settings were taken at this critical juncture and marked in many streets by graffiti as an output of protest democracy and as evidence of frustration with conventional discursive sites. This chapter aims accordingly to analyze an example of the political dimensions of graffiti in this period, embedded not only as a cultural practice but mostly as a political urban setting for contestation. Methodologically, this chapter focuses on a set of photographs of several graffiti taken in the city of Lisbon between July 2012 and April 2014 (therefore many of them no longer exist), simultaneously as a record and as a catalogue of the historical and political momentum of a time of dissent.