this ideology reveals itself in other ways too - in fact, in the street art community a very sharp distinction is made between tagging (pichação) and graffiti art (grafite).

pichação comes from the portuguese word for tar (piche), which was the medium of choice for early taggers.

and though views on the incentives behind pichação tend toward the more stereotypical ideas about graffiti such as social protest, territorialism and name recognition, it has also produced an authentically brazilian product, characterized by the stark, angular and cryptic characters used, nearly always in black.