Pod Academy

This is the second in our series based on Rod Stoneman's book, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual. In the podcast, Rod analyses the subculture of graffiti and its social and political significance, using this Banksy graffito in Cleveland Street London W1 as his jumping off point. The podcast is produced and presented by Esther Gaytan Fuertes. Rod Stoneman: This image is a photograph taken in a central London street and it shows a graffito made by Banksy. The original starting point for street art and for graffiti —obviously there are precedents in ancient cultures in different times and different places, quite apart from Pompeii and Herculaneum and Greek cities in Western civilisations, it’s not just a phenomenon of the West, one could even look further afield to Mexico, where contemporary political graffiti stencilled in Oaxaca, for example, since in 2006 when there there was a teachers’ strike, connects with the mural painting of the 1920s and 30s when politicised painters worked on art that