ABSTRACT
Graffiti School Comunidad. These three words together evoke some inherent contradictions. What does graffiti have to do with schooling? What can we possibly teach through the use of graffiti, an often-criminalized urban art form? How can one build comunidad around a street practice that privileges the individuality of its practitioners? In this chapter, we will discuss how the convergence of these three words, far from representing contradictions, signify the building blocks for the radical practice of a feminist pedagogy. The Graffiti School Comunidad (GSC) is a community arts initiative based on collaborative workshops where participants not only learn creative skills inspired by street art practices, but also develop strategies of resilience and survival through a profound reconceptualization of the self and the collective. The GSC began in 2010 when a single graffiti workshop taking place in Valparaiso, Chile, led to a long-term project that brought together the non-hegemonic and alternative knowledges produced through street art and the emancipatory potential of feminist pedagogy. Though the GSC is adaptable to different social and geographical settings, it bears mentioning that the specificity of 21st-century Chilean culture and society provided a powerful impetus for the emergence of this initiative. The country’s rich and complex tradition of street art—which includes graffiti but also muralism, public performance and other forms of expression—alongside the social movements that have defined its recent history, created a fertile ground upon which the GSC could grow and develop.
