Horror Vacui

Team: Siliano Simoncini

Research: Horror Vacui is an editorial product that analyses the graffiti-writing phenomenon through an historical, anthropological, and, mostly, stylistic point of view. This particular point of view is a result of my personal necessity to go over some general terms as graffiti and street art, in order to define a name and a category to all those scripts that we see on our metropolis’ walls.
So, studying the New York 70’s writer’s slang, I started a semantic research that defined precisely every kind of graphic element that belongs to the graffiti-writing category, using four main filters:
the tools, the styles, the spots, the ego-war. Describing on a theoretical level the graphic characteristics of graffiti-writing and linking to every description some significant images (adapted from fanzines, websites, researches, etc), I was able to demonstrate the proper use of those terms, which, unfortunately, are often ignored by researchers and art critics.

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