Street Art: From Impertinent Transgression to Inclusive Citizenship

The image, whether produced or enjoyed, is the first symbolic ommunicative act based on processes that manifest themselves outside one’s bodily self. Starting with the very first drawings of small children, we can easily trace our need/desire to share messages, perceptions, doubts and ideas with other people. Street art, thanks to its technical characteristics, its particular expressive form, and the original canvas it uses, can be a very important stepping-stone for the development of creativity and divergence of thought, a creativity that must not be confused with the messy and chaotic defacing of public spaces. It must coincide with the ability to find alternatives to linear ways of learning, experimenting and finding original strategies that can provide more articulated answers -- thus more adapted to the complexity that characterizes one’s awareness of being and feeling part of a community. Street art can be a methodological strategy for opening up education for citizenship, legality, and respect for the res publica. Young students of all types and school levels can appropriate the concept of collective heritage, the sense of belonging to the territory where they live, transforming an act that is in itself transgressive into a recognized and shared action, into a legitimate product that leaves a permanent trace of their passage in the schools they attend, in the public squares they cross, in the cities where they live.