street art...guerrilla tile style

illicit scribbling on public spaces is still a punishable crime. however, since the the 90's it has slowly been captivating the world and the world of art where it has eventuated into the pilfering of chunks of urban landscape in order to be sold to the highest bidder. graffiti has come a loooong way...

banksy

banksy was probably the first to elevate street art into a revered artform, turning his clever stencils into a commentary of our political, social, cultural and ecological indiscretions. at the same time, invader was emerging with his colorful space invader characters. made of square mosaic tiles, they started popping up all around the globe, onto prominent statuary and even the hollywood sign.

invader

in brazil, MUDA is a group of designers and architects who have also taken their art to the streets with their own artistic expression formed using ceramic tiles. as quoted in the rio times: "Moving beyond the identifiable aesthetics of modern graffiti and into a yet-to-be-defined potential of what public art can be. Their medium, ceramic tiles."

muda in brazil

MUDA's use of ceramic tile pushed them into studying the various ways that ceramic tiles have been used to tell a specific history all around the world. for centuries, governments have commissioned installations of ceramic tile to tell a "glazed" version of the story of their community. a sort of ceramic state of the nation. and brazil is widely noted for their own vast history of public ceramic embellishments.

the rio times explains that MUDA can be translated as both the imperative “you change!” but also refers to the seedlings of plants, and brazil is the perfect soil for muda's seedlings. in a previous tile envy post, (see here) i focused on the revered works of brazilian artist, athos bulcão, who decorated a host of oscar niemeyer projects with the intent of showing the glory and endurance of a new brazil. MUDA is more than a nod to bulcão.