Rhizomatic Writings on the Wall: Graffiti and Street Art in Cochabamba, Bolivia, as Nomadic Visual Politics

Authors

  • Lucia Mulherin Palmer University of Texas at Austin

Keywords:

graffiti, street art, nomadic visual politics, rhizome, Bolivia

Abstract

Politicized graffiti and street art are omnipresent in the Andean city of Cochabamba, Bolivia, invading stratified urban spaces and overwriting official speech and symbols. This article aims to build on scholarship that understands graffiti and street art as a potent creative form of recovering space, building counterpublics, and challenging structures of exclusion and oppression. A Deleuzean rhizomatic approach is used to investigate the visual politics of graffiti and street art as they travel nomadically through Cochabamba, breaching exclusionary public gridded space and legacies of colonialism. Analyzing photographs taken in Cochabamba during 2012 as a case study, this article argues that graffiti acts subversively to write through, between, and over dominant images and narratives in the city.

Author Biography

Lucia Mulherin Palmer, University of Texas at Austin

Lucia Palmer is a doctoral candidate in the Radio-Television-Film department at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her MA in Journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2013. Her research is informed by critical theory and cultural studies, in particular by the work of feminist and postcolonial scholars. Currently her research interests include the intersection between media discourses and constructions of nationality, gender, race and sexuality, with a focus especially on the context of the U.S-Mexico border region. Additionally, she is interested in how cultural and political movements utilize the media, in particular alternative and independent media formats, to struggle over social processes of meaning production.

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Published

2017-09-29

Issue

Vol. 11 (2017)

Section

Articles

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