Memória e identidade no discurso do graffiti no espaço urbano de João Pessoa

Abstract

This paper’s general objective is analyzing the visual materiality of graffiti aiming to study its meaning production of quotidian discourse, which circulates on João Pessoa’s city urban space. Therefore, we are discussing matters that involve sense, meaning, power, memory and identity. We verify in our corpus that symbols repetition is often recurrent on collected graffiti, as Church presence (representing the catholic religion, which is very outstanding in our culture), Cordel characters, the cashew fruit (it is a fruit present on Brazilian’s Northwest regarding to its favorable climate) and rollicking characters such as Boi-de-Reis. It lead us to investigate discursive memory and cultural identity as well as discuss power relations and resilience that go by graffiti practice. This research central question is: The repetition of identitary symbols, which are referring to Northwest’s cultural tradition, can secure an identity in “modern liquid” times (graffiti is a modern art, urban, and several times ephemerons) or is there a new meaning of social memory on urban space? We will try to prove the redefinition of social memory with the use of these graffiti. This paper corpus is made of twenty graffiti pieces that has been photographed in João Pessoa city between 2010 and 2014, for complementing it, we are using touristic and cultural Northwest’s flyers, whose symbols are similar to those found on graffiti. Ours analysis are based on Discourse Analysis interfaced with Cultural Studies theorists (Stuart Hall, Tomaz Tadeu da Silva, Kathryn Woodward) and the sociologist Zigmunt Bauman.