Marginal Images: Youth and Critical Subjectivities from Art as a Resource

The aim of the chapter is to show how art practices may allow marginalized youth to develop reflexivity, autonomy, and subjectivity regarding their own social situation, as well as an alternative conception of citizenship. The authors base their arguments on ethnographic fieldwork carried out as part of the project CETOJ (Technological Centre of Youth Organisations), which took place in a marginalized neighborhood in Quito (Ecuador). The ethnographic research regarded young people as particular social actors, who create interconnected “worlds,” with their own rules and morality, which questions the reductionist definition of “the youth” by state institutions and NGOs. The research shows that street art practices, particularly graffiti and photography in the case of the CETOJ project, allow young people—most of them gang members—to take a critical distance from their experiences of exclusion and violence and to understand these experiences from a complex perspective. Furthermore, street art practices constitute modes of appropriation of urban spaces that question the citizenship conception of state institutions.