The article deals with the political-critical potentiality of graffiti and street art, which, despite institutionalisation and incorporation, stubbornly maintains steady torque. To understand the persistence of a multitude of forms of visual production, which deterritorialise marketing, cultural and historical aesthetisation of the modern urban milieu, the article will try to analyse graffiti practice through its own singular logic of deterritorialisation of public space through which it creates spaces of the commons. Epistemologically speaking, it is no longer just a question of the semantic practice of graffiti but the materialistic question of what graffiti is doing. The article consequently discusses the theoretical rotation from ‘signifying’ to a materialistic theory in the field of graffiti scholarship.
