Museum of Graffiti's latest exhibit entitled Defying Authority opening on December 4, 2024 highlighting artists from around the world breaking tradition by pushing boundaries. ENERI is one of the artists featured within the exhibit. We sat down with her to answer 5 questions that we needed answers to.
1.When did you start writing graffiti and why?
I started in 2013, first with tag-style writing, using squeezers and chalk along my daily routes. That same year, I began exploring different materials and aesthetics, like bombing and pixação, but I spent a few more years focusing mainly on tags until I fully understood the cultural relevance behind the pixação style. Over time, as I gradually started scaling taller buildings, I developed my current aesthetic and refined my climbing skills.
2. What is pixação from your perspective?
Pixação is a uniquely Brazilian style that aims to break away from the imported aesthetics of graffiti—something that happens across many aspects of Brazilian reality, like architecture, music, fashion, and art. It’s characterized by a simple and aggressive aesthetic, with one key rule in the streets: never paint over someone else’s tag. This preserves the city’s history, with pixos from the ’80s and ’90s still visible on walls. The movement also became vertical early on, with entire buildings covered in pixação, climbed floor by floor from the outside in major Brazilian cities.
The minimalist aesthetic also reflects the economic conditions of the people who practice it. Filling and coloring pieces would mean higher costs, so the goal is to cover as much space as possible using the least amount of paint.
3.How did you start scaling buildings?
Since childhood, I was fascinated by how pixação dominated the cityscape and often wondered how people managed to reach such heights. When I started going to pixação points—places where pixadores meet organically on specific days without the need for formal organization to exchange tags, hang out, and watch freestyle rap battles—I began to see the city’s architecture in a whole new way. It opened up endless possibilities for me.
However, I’ve always felt (and still feel, though less so now) uncomfortable with heights, so it was a gradual process. I spent years doing lower, simpler pieces until, in 2019, I started doing more complex climbs without any protective equipment, as well as rappelling down some buildings.
Everything I know I learned from people through lived experiences. Vg taught me a lot about climbing, and Lala—one of the most incredible women in rope pixação in Brazil—was the one who taught me how to rappel for the first time. Over time, I sought autonomy in executing these techniques, but having trusted people by your side often expands and strengthens what’s possible.
4. What is unique about being a woman practicing this art form?
For me, what’s unique is how I rediscovered myself and everything around me after I started painting in the streets. I found my strength, my power—physically, mentally, and intuitively. I rediscovered my city and how to read the possibilities around me. I’ve been to places and met people I never would have if it weren’t for pixação.
But it’s not all positive—I’ve faced risky situations that were even more intense because I’m a woman. We’re often seen as easy targets, and I wonder how some situations would’ve played out differently if I were a man.
Still, there’s something unique about the hunger we women have to occupy and resist in spaces that, for a long time—and still today, though it’s starting to change—have been dominated by men. I believe we, as women, need to support each other because our presence makes these spaces less hostile for us all.
5. You don’t worry about sharing your face. Why is that?
Honestly, I never thought I’d reach this level of visibility. In Latin America, hiding your identity hasn’t been as much of an issue because, for a long time, technologies like facial recognition weren’t widely used here. Plus, with the hot climate, someone fully covered would look super suspicious walking down the street—haha.
Over time, I saw friends (and even myself) face different types of legal repression, with some even getting arrested because of pixação. We’re prosecuted as if we commit environmental crimes here in Brazil, while corporate owners responsible for catastrophic disasters—like the Vale dam collapse in Brumadinho, which caused a toxic mudslide that killed hundreds of people and devastated the environment, or the Braskem case in Maceió, where salt mining led to the sinking of entire neighborhoods—remain free with no legal consequences for their actions.
I don’t believe I’m some dangerous criminal who needs to hide my face. I understand that pixação, like graffiti, is rooted in illegality and vandalism, but compared to the horrors people commit around the world without feeling the need to hide, why should I? My only “crime” is putting paint on walls.
It’s an urban response—paint over walls, the urban over the urban. After all, the greatest crime is the very existence of cities over ecosystems.
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