TAGG WARS

or TOYS * (Trouble On Your System)

Cities talk.

They reflect natural and faithfully their inhabitants, telling stories and revealing cultures.

It's in the set of all differences that we find the city génesis.

When we ramble the streets, we're constantly being confronted with images of houses, buildings, urbanizations, gardens, placards, traffic signals, traffic lights, dust-bins... It's in this diverse imaginary that the city's image stands, where spray, pen or even knife inscriptions born, covering electric boxes, telephone boxes, shop-windows, traffic lights, cooller station-wagons, walls, bus stops, ATMs, trains, abandoned walls, etc. The inscriptions grow and spread, illegals, wraping the city, revealing a cultural phenomenon that infiltrates our daily life, representing personal or small youth groups signatures.

The "Tagg" was born in the poor suburbs of New York (Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn) in the 70's, as form of identification and bording gang territories. Nowadays this form of expression, although still illegal, gained acceptance by youth and was transformed in affirmation and critic in the image's society.

Crime, urban revolt or individual expression need, "Tagg" is here to stay, wheter we like it or not.

This work reflects in an analogy form the "Tagg" in itself, because the author forces it in an equal form over urban scenes, by it's capture and framing through transparent surfaces where it can be found

Text: Miguel Coxofel//www.ruadesign.net
Translation: Sofia Quintas

* In slang used by taggers and graffiters, toys are the beginners, in opposition to kings, the veterans. One thinks that the title 'toys' derives exactlly from the initials of 'trouble on your system'.