In recent years, Brazil has been discussed as an emergent or booming economy. São Paulo plays a central role in these development narratives, being presented as the country’s economic powerhouse and an island of modernity within Brazil and Latin America. Policies aiming to consolidate São Paulo’s global or world city-ness deepen inequalities and exclusions. Nevertheless, these policies are confronted with visual intervention practices in public spaces that do not fit modern Euro-American business capital imaginaries and standards. Pixação is a typical style of graffiti found in Brazilian cities, originally practiced by youth in São Paulo in the 1980s. Though the signatures, spread across Brazilian cities’ façades, generally do not contain any explicit political content, we discuss pixação as an everyday practice of resistance in the context of spatial segregation and the repressive policing of public space. Furthermore, we refer to recent cases of pixadores getting involved in broader social struggles, making their techniques and knowledge prolific instruments for social movements. Finally, we show that practitioners in European cities have recently adopted these techniques. Thus, we argue that the multidirectional knowledge exchange claimed by post-colonial urban theory is being practiced in the field of visual interventions in public space.