Cities within Cities: The Graffiti Artists who are Shaking Up Maps

Street artists are showing how they’d map cities differently in a new show that lets visitors step into their clandestine worlds. The drooping rags turn out to be latex, peeled from the sinuous cast-iron shields of Hector Guimard’s spectacular art nouveau entrances to the Paris Metro. They hang beside a slumped rubbery sack on a plinth – another latex cast, this time a stone cat from the cemetery of Montmartre. Both are the work of Ken Sortais, a professional golfer turned street artist, now member of Paris’s revered PAL graffiti crew, whose cursive letterforms, thrown up on walls all over the city, have reached new levels of baroque extravagance. These latex ghosts form a typically gnomic contribution to Mapping the City, an exhibition of the responses by 50 international street artists to being asked to map their cities “through subjective surveying rather than objective ordinance”. Conventional cartography this is not …READ MORE