“if we’re going to get busted, we’re going get busted paiting shop windows”

tensions of power and resistance between graffiti artists and taggers with the military police in Antares

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2025/88110

The present work aims to comprehend, from a critical and interdisciplinary approach, the perception of graffiti artists and taggers about the tensioning of power and resistance with the military police in the processes of marginalization and criminalization of urban interventions in the city of Antares, a fictitious name chosen not to identify the research site in order to avoid the exposure of the interviewees. For that, in a first moment, the representation of graffiti and of tagging for the culture of the cities was identified; following that, the structures of power in the cultural scope were analyzed from the theoretical basis of Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant; then, a dialogue between critical criminology and cultural criminology was held to accommodate objective and subjective moments of analysis of marginalization and the criminalization of urban interventions on the periphery of capitalism, as well as composing empirical studies with graffiti artists and taggers to dimension the tensioning of power and of resistance with the military police in the city of Antares. In order to make it possible to understand these relations, ten (10) semi-structured interviews were conducted with the urban interventionists in the city. The methodological design was created based on the qualitative method of an inductive character and based on the Grounded Theory (GT), since the categories of analysis came from the data collected in the interview field. From the study, it was found that before rethinking the device that criminalizes urban interventions, it is necessary to pay attention to the truculent relations between State and graffiti artists and taggers in the city.