Italian street artist Blu uses household paint and paint rollers on telescopic sticks to cover the facades of buildings, water towers, ruins, and bridges with epic-scale political cartoons that embody dramatic and sarcastic messages about consumerism, inequality, and militarization. Blu falls into a category of street artists like Banksy, Swoon, and Mark Jenkins whose works are celebrated and commissioned by municipal and private institutions. His career takes him on regional tours through Latin America, Europe, and the United States to paint murals paid for by local governments, urban planners, and art galleries. However, street art only became a career for Blu once his talent could be capitalized upon by the city. Initially, his murals were not a career, but an illicit art practice, one that risked arrest and detention for interfering with public space. In the realm of street art, this difference between graffiti and public mural is that of tactic versus strategy. Once a non-powerful pedestrian who adapted and challenged the environment around him, Blu now designs and shapes space as a government-sanctioned urban planner.

Blu’s graffiti transitioned from aerosol to household paint at the turn of the twenty-first century while working on a series in Bologna, at which point he began to develop massive caricatures that distinguished him from other artists in the area. His notoriety amongst the Italian urban landscape made way for collaborations with other influential graffiti artists and the emergence of new creative networks, allowing him to produce intricate and textured paintings that received recognition from small art galleries that eventually hired him.

At this point in his career, Blu’s interaction with urban space takes a crucial turn. As Craig Campbell illustrates in his essay, “Minor Marks and Modifications: Foot Traffic,” Blu’s work up to this point “is an oppositional practice governed by the question of legitimacy” (16). By sheer virtue of semantics and word-association, the graffiti artist as compared to the mural artist remains in continual contestation with city administration and territorial claim. Their interferences with the materiality of the city challenge and displace the strategic, technological landscapes of the built environment. Such intervention with physical surfaces is the dilution of the image of the functionalist organization. As Michel de Certeau claims in his chapter, “Walking in the City,” graffiti art undermines the strategies taken by the functionalist organization to negotiate places “of transformations and appropriations, the objects of various kinds of interference,” becoming these transformations and “contradictory movements that counter-balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power” (96). 

In this way, Blu’s early work takes a tactical approach to adapting the environment, reassessing public space into canvases on which he constructs his own grammars of artful expression. If “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language,” then the tactical rerouting of pedestrian traffic accounts for the irregularities of urban design and the grammatical errors not considered by city planners (de Certeau, 98). To further extend this metaphor, graffiti expounds upon the speech of the pedestrian, acting as a sudden break from speech itself into the realm of onomatopoeia. No language nor grammar can spell out or put into words the explosive verbalizations of onomatopoeia, and so dictionaries tend not to include them. Similarly, graffiti is so discreetly oppositional that it cannot be explained by the grammar set forth by urban strategy. As a result, the functionalist organization strategizes methods of replacing such “tactics of users who take advantage of ‘opportunities’” by incorporating street art into the redistribution of urban space or by removing it altogether (de Certeau, 95). 

Today, nearly two decades into his career, Blu’s murals invade dozens of high-profile cities like Berlin, Vienna, New York, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Kraków because museums, galleries, and city planners invite him into the process of producing space. The city protects his murals as private property, signalling his incorporation into the infrastructures of power, control, and strategy. Public art projects are one method of contesting the tactics of the street artist so as to fit them into the frameworks of urban strategy, forecasting a transition of the criminal graffiti artist into the producer of spaces where pedestrians are expected to abide by mores and law. Suddenly, defacing Blu’s murals is an act of vandalism and destruction of private property. When a street artist like Blu paints a public mural, they help rewrite the contract between the powerful and the pedestrian, returning power to the urban planner. By taking advantage of the street artist, the city becomes a site for “transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes” (de Certeau, 96).

Functionalist administration also contests street art by removing it altogether through erasure and censorship, treating it like a waste product whose redistribution threatens the rationalization of the city. Art galleries have even censored Blu’s commissioned public works, such as when the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art white-washed his mural facing the Veterans Administration healthcare building that depicted coffins wrapped in one-dollar bills. By removing his political message from the public eye, the museum acts to protect its own mythology and “repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it” and the rational organization of the city (de Certeau, 95).

Debates on street art censorship and erasure enters an interesting discourse when the artist themselves decide to remove their public work. Between 2006 and 2009, Blu and fellow artists, JR and Lutz Henke, painted epic murals in Kreuzberg, a borough in Berlin known for its queer, punk rock, and multi-ethnic countercultures. Henke states that these murals ignited worldwide attention and mass-immigration to the neighborhood, creating “an ideal visual representation of the imaginary Berlin of the noughties and its promises: a city full of wasteland offering plenty of space for affordable living and creative experimentation among the ruins of its recent history” (online). Henke affords the recent gentrification and zombification of Kreuzberg to the murals themselves, and as a result, he and Blu decided to paint over them with black paint in 2014:

By physically removing his own work, Blu maintains control over both its visibility in public space and its erasure from that space. Most importantly, it is an act of protest against the functionalist organizations that metamorphose Kreuzberg and exploit it for its art scenes. As “it is the nature of street art to occupy space in celebration of its uncertainty, being aware of its temporality and fleeting existence (Henke),” Blu devises a new relationship between the work and the city in order to challenge the functionalist strategies that transform space into “the blind spot in a scientific and political technology” of privileged progress (de Certeau, 96). Painting over the Kreuzberg murals is thus a tactical inversion and contestation of the accumulation of capitalist power embodied in the space. Whereas the murals initially signified municipal control over Blu as a street artist, he exhibits a deposition of this power. By painting the mural, he participates in the urban framework as an urban planner, but painting over it subverts and restructures this framework. This act signifies a return to the temporary nature of street art and the tactical implementation of its production.

Blu’s erasure of his own work is not limited to the Kreuzberg murals, as seen in his stop-motion videos in which his murals move about a space. Each frame is a still photograph of a public facade like a building, bridge, sidewalk, sea wall, water tower, or drainage pipe, on which one of Blu’s cartoons is painted. With each new frame, Blu paints over his cartoon and repaints it a slight distance from the first, altering its position and form so that the rapid succession of these images creates the illusion of movement, a continuous trajectory of motion across time. Not only do his cartoons become animated, but they appear to interact with the public surfaces on which they exist, climbing fence posts, scaling walls, and combusting and shattering as they collide with a stop sign or sidewalk.

Surfaces transform into exhibition spaces and then back into surfaces — canvases are flattened by the film plane into a photograph. A new photograph cannot be taken until the image on the canvas changes. The succession of stop-motion images mandates the duration with which each painting exists as part of the urban landscape. As such, Blu indexes his street art in a manner that requires their erasure. To exist permanently in the animated film, each painting must exit the public space. By erasing his own graffiti, Blu acts upon his agency as a pedestrian to undermine the power of private ownership. In this act, no one controls his work but himself.

1. Blu. “Walls.” BluBlu.org

2. Campbell, Craig. “Minor Marks and Modifications: Foot Traffic.” In TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, edited by Elena Siemens, 16-27. Alberta Canada: University of Alberta Library, 2014.

3. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.

4. Henke, Lutz. “Why We Painted over Berlin’s Most Famous Graffiti.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media Limited, 19 Dec. 2014, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/19/why-we-painted-over-berlin-graffiti-kreuzberg-murals

5. Schindlmayr, Kai, et al. “Blu Biography.” Street Art Bio, www.streetartbio.com/blu.