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

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.