GrafPin — urban art archive

Graffiti and muralism are ephemeral heritage: they get painted over, scrubbed off, they disappear with the wall. GrafPin documents them before they are lost. Someone photographs a piece, it is geolocated, and over time the wall builds up its own timeline: what was there before, what is there now.

The project has three pieces: a web platform with a map, artist profiles, moderation and cultural context; a mobile app to capture work in the street with camera and GPS; and a line of academic research that underpins the work with a documentary corpus of its own.

That research produced a paper on the phenomenology of global graffiti, submitted to an academic journal and under review since July 2026.

The archive data is publicly available: there is an open API, with no authentication, exposing the documented pieces —location, city, styles, context— deliberately without any data about the people who upload them, and in open formats. For now it is free to use, at no cost.