Writings acts and protest actions: The role of graffiti during the 2019 outbreak in Santiago,Chile

Abstract

Building on the writing acts approach, recent research on urban revolts, and the literature on political graffiti, the present manuscript aims to make sense of the role of graffiti during the 2019 outbreak in Santiago, Chile. Based on a collection of outbreak photographs, the graffiti in them, and a content analysis of the writing acts embedded in graffiti, we find the outbreak was an “autonomist politics” event. The outbreak, that is, was noticeably marked by the absence of a unifying and coherent ideology and by anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian impulses, features associated with autonomist politics. Our findings similarly suggest that outbreak graffiti animated boundary—and identity—making; promoted courses of action; communicated the social and political needs of protesters; and evinced the mobilization of protesters as emotional. Importantly, our analysis also suggests outbreak graffiti projects a prefiguring of a more democratic future for Chilean society.