Street Art and the Cultural Heritage of the Contemporary City

Street art interventions are an essential and living part of the contemporary city and, although they are so visible – always under the eyes of everyone, both in the spaces of the material and virtual city – they are rarely considered carefully both in their technical and artistic specificity. Moreover, one of the aspects in the current critical analysis as well as in representation and documentation of this type of work, often overlooked, if not omitted, is the fundamental importance of the physical, architectural and urban environment in which it is placed. This essay proposes a methodology of documentation that respects the values of the process as well as the work itself. It is necessary to consider the painted walls as objects inseparable from the space in which they are located, along with the material substrate that supports them and the temporal conditions in which they were realized. In this sense, the process of examination and documentation that we propose necessarily requires observation in situ, different survey techniques, from digital to traditional ones, and a variety of representations at different scales through which understand the reasons that led to the choice of a particular place in the city and the way in which the artistic action arises in relation to the historical environment and the social and political system that somehow conditioned its creation.