Taking it all off: Reverse graffiti swaps spray paint for soap
The Reverse Graffiti project has turned the concept of street art on its head. Instead of spray painting city surfaces, the Reverse Graffiti team artfully cleans up urban dirt and soot to create lovely designs with stencils, scrubbing, and high-pressure hoses. After completing installations in the UK last year, the artists were recently commissioned by GreenWorks—a plant-based line of cleaning products made by Clorox—to create a 140-foot-long mural in a San Francisco tunnel. For more details on the reverse graffiti process, watch a short documentary video on YouTube and peruse the photo gallery to see in-process shots.
What’s more, reverse graffiti can do more than endorse green cleaners. In Brazil, a subversive reverse graffiti installation led the San Paulo government to clean up its city after artist Alexandre Orion created a mural of skulls by removing car dirt from a tunnel wall. The police were unable to stop him because cleaning is not a criminal offense, so in order to remove his work, the city cleaned all of the soot from the panel Orion had decorated. In response, Orion created a similar mural on the next dirtied panel and the city wound up cleaning all of its tunnels to thwart future “graffiti” attempts.
[via Inhabitat]
