A vida nas paredes pobres: sentidos, usos e contradições da street art enquanto política urbano-cultural

Abstract

Walking through the streets of distant districts from the central Lisbon, it is not difficult to come across large murals that compose a new urban aesthetic in peripheral neighborhoods. The city that thinks colorful, watered by the banks of the Tejo River, made the color of the walls a policy of urban-cultural decentralization through the creation of spaces such as the Galeria de Arte Urbana (GAU) that has been operating since 2008 to promote the street art. In this article I intend to debate the meanings, uses and contradictions that involved three experiences of carrying out the “Festival Muro” in social districts, far from the tourist centrality of Lisbon territory. Through an ethnography of contradictory visual processes, I seek to understand the effects that such landscape transformation projects have had on the life of the neighborhoods. Finally, I reflect on the possible impacts of these large muralism projects linked to both cultural decentralization and urban development.