What do you see when you walk down a city street? Most of us encounter graffiti and street art in everyday life. His drawings and poetic codes disrupt our everyday patterns of circulation, they change the landscape that surrounds us, they confuse it. The effect graffiti artists seek is often a head-on collision – there is something transgressive about creativity, and street art brings it out. The marginal, the unnameable, and that which circulates only as rumor, or the transfigured uncanny, appears to us in full light as it happens in a public square, therein lies some of the wonder they arouse. The street is a huge stage where graffiti invades the city landscape like an unforeseen color: in railway carriages and other means of transport, in tunnels, subways and in public toilets, especially in the walls. It is worthwhile not to make hasty or ideological judgments about this highly complex social phenomenon in order to understand its nuances.
We tend to expect cityscapes to be readable, but graffiti and street art destabilize their encoding and infiltrate them with an alternative worldview, if only for a moment. They direct their gaze to the wall: while defending privacy and private property, they cross and attack it, thus revealing beyond themselves the territory and the individual. They offer a visual language to look through the wall and create imaginary spaces. They show us that the borders are not really borders and that border walls are rhetorical acts of security promoted by special interest ideologies. Graffiti has been a tool of dissidence in the protests and it’s clear it will continue to be present. Try deleting them and they will reappear.
Graffiti artists are the reservoirs of the fantasies, fears, anger and disappointments that the denizens of our cities sweat out. As social agents, they covertly implement their strategies, sometimes at the cost of fines, jail time, or risking their own lives by clinging to unstable websites. In 2011, Mexican artist Ana Teresa Fernández placed a massive staircase on the border wall separating Playas de Tijuana from Border Field State Park in San Diego and set about painting the bars sky blue with a paint spray gun. (Fernández had envisioned: World Without Border Walls.) In his imaginary spaces, the steel sheets separating the two countries disappear, while the rusty bars of the cell transform into a bluish sky. The border manifests itself as a powerful symbol, as a place of utopian possibilities. At the same time, the border wall is a reminder of violent submission. “I was very happy,” said Fernández, “when in the late afternoon a jogger came from afar from the beach and told us that he thought for a moment that part of the wall had collapsed.”
In the 1970s, graffiti accompanied the revolutionary processes in Somoza-Nicaragua. Omar Cabezas and Dora María Téllez – the so-called Commander Two, heroine of the Sandinista revolution, recently released from a Nicaraguan prison – describe it in their book The Rising of the Walls: “While we oust them from power and from the barracks before we do expelled from the walls… The voice of the silenced took the walls by storm.” Graffiti is a way of reclaiming the word, a popular and creative practice to break up the monolithic discourses of power and institutions. “I say that the proof that the people are for the revolution can be on the walls,” concludes Téllez.
In addition to the potential for denunciation, it turns out to be a humanistic and deeply psychological project, the product of man’s confrontation with the wall; he clings to his symptoms of the forbidden, of oppression, to these drawings created under the influence of an unknown but visible impulse. The unconscious manifestation of graffiti, according to the Franco-Hungarian photographer Brassaï, is irrefutable proof of the existence of a primitive creative force. As early as 1933 he exclaimed in his essay “From the cave wall to the factory wall”: “How hard is the stone! How rudimentary are their instruments! Is important! It’s no longer about playing, it’s about controlling the frenzy of the unconscious.” A stone’s throw from the Paris Opera, Brassaï finds on the walls signs similar to those of Pompeii, the Dordogne caves or the Nile valley. The same fear that furrowed the walls of the caves with a chaotic world of engravings of hunting, migration or reproduction, today generates drawings on themes specifically related to survival.
This region, where the walls speak and the hard-won rules break down, enriches our movements in urban space and invites us to pay attention to the curious, enigmatic or ideological provocations that the walls may whisper to us.
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