560 pages Edited by Alexandre S. Text(s) by Alexandre S., Riot, Bart, Honet, Mellie, Goat and others Foreword by Gysmo Designed by Clément Criseo 28 x 19 cm Language: French & English Hardback Publisher: Éditions Terrain Vague Limited edition of 500 copies with a hand-illustrated map by Fafa de Bègles 2025
Bordeaux 90, Naissance d’une scène graff is a bilingual publication that traces the emergence of graffiti in Bordeaux in the 1990's, a decisive decade during which a generation laid the foundations of a distinctive visual language, freed from dominant codes and in constant dialogue with the city. Richly illustrated, notably through previously unpublished analog photographic archives, the book is neither a simple image catalog nor a succession of interviews. Instead, it adopts a hybrid form that blends firsthand narratives with contextual analysis, offering something different: a vivid, structured reading of a movement initiated by a small group of curious and daring teenagers.
Inspired by the first images coming from the United States or Paris, and working with the means available at the time—album covers, fanzines, travel, chance encounters, and passing figures—they gave rise to a fully fledged local scene. What began as a marginal gesture quickly became a shared language, a wave that swept up part of Bordeaux’s youth, hungry for freedom, signs, and expression.
At the crossroads of skate culture, hip-hop, hardcore punk, and other subcultures in full effervescence, Bordeaux graffiti developed without dogma, in a climate of near-total freedom. A blend of carefree energy, graphic drive, diffuse rebellion, and a search for style emerged, expressed as much in “urban calligraphies”—these proudly proliferating tags—as in more complex paintings executed on trains or in the region’s industrial wastelands. Probably less codified than in other cities, perhaps more spontaneous and more permeable to influences, this scene nonetheless developed its own visual grammar—instinctive and free—shaped by the routes and urban surfaces that the city offered it, willingly or not.
