Street Art Was Here. On the Ephemeral Nature of Graffiti in Contemporary Cities

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a reflection on the conditions of existence, both spatial and temporal, which characterize street art. For the urbanized human, graffiti takes the form of both an individual narrative and the expression of an entire community. Graffiti disturbs, dirties, and strikes where society shows weaknesses and contradictions, but it also becomes an instrument of gentrification in cities, functioning as an operator of the selective redevelopment of urban areas (Harvey 2012; Sassen 2014). From these assumptions, what distinguishes this artistic and social practice is a dual process: on the one hand, its ethical-political dimension which is realized through forms of occupation of public space in the form of wall-writing, on the other hand, its ephemeral and transitory dimension that problematizes the concept of ‘artisticity’ (Goodman 1968, 1984; Fabbri 2010) in terms of the protection and preservation of artistic heritage. In order to reflect on these intrinsic characteristics of street art and graffiti, the paper will focus on different case studies, such as the Tour Paris 13, in Paris (from 1st to 31st October, 2013), and TheHaus, Berlin Art Bang in Berlin (from 1 st April to 31 st May, 2017). The occupation of these spaces, destined to become rubble, as well as the possibility of visiting the frescoed inner rooms of the buildings, are processes that make these places a symbolic street art “Tower of Babel.” Here artists have met to construct their own language and to communicate not only the importance of the urbanised humans’ voice in public spaces but to implement a reflection on and a form of resistance to contemporary strategies and practices of artification (Heinich&Shapiro 2012) and musealization of street art. The paper aims to demonstrate how these places could be legible as a manifesto of street art today: an invisible monument of this social-art practice.