On graffiti and social explosion

The 2019 estallido social or social explosion in Chile also produced an explosion of graffiti on the streets of Santiago and elsewhere. This essay approaches this graffiti as expressions of crisis and as such bound up in the historical determinations of any cultural form. The peculiar form of graffiti, which might be described as a contradictory unity of word and image, lends itself to a method of interpretation that refuses both a fixation on locality and an easy leap to the global. Graffiti too contains its political and aesthetic unconscious. Drawing a single symbol from the accumulation of signs enables a methodical mediation of its various determinations. Rather than reading the motif of the bleeding or bloody eye as simply a direct response to state violence, this essay suggests that the eye can be understood as symbolic of the ‘rotting egg’ of the state itself – in other words for the prolonged crisis of social reproduction. Unfolding this apparent symbol into its allegorical significance, tracing the contours of its social and historical ground, allows us to deepen our understanding of graffiti as cultural practice in its relation to crisis.