Maintaining the Walls Graffiti-Free: Infrastructure Work, Care, Public Order

• In Event: Infrastructures, Maintenance and Care - II

Abstract

In 1999, the mayor of Paris, Jean Tiberi, has made the fight against graffiti a top priority. His policy stood in an ambitious six-year program, based on a call for tenders that was organized in two successive phases. The first, known as the “upgrade” phase, aimed to eliminate at least 90% of the graffiti for the first twelve months. The second phase, called “maintenance”, consisted in removing any new graffiti detected during the next five years. Once the program has been completed, this maintenance phase was renewed, making the organization of graffiti removal a long-term process. In this presentation, I will investigate the practical conditions of this maintenance work, emphasizing two main aspects that emerge from the fieldwork ethnography. Performed in the streets on a daily basis, graffiti removal is not about merely erasing some unwanted inscriptions. Rather, it systematically involves an infrastructural work made of a wide range of material and theoretical components, which are assembled in a specific manner to meet sociomaterial, aesthetic, and political requirements. Consequently, this infrastructural work goes well beyond mere technical interventions. Indeed, removing graffiti means caring for multiple entities at once, at the core of the relational dynamic between facades and interventions. An everyday infrastructural and caring work, maintaining the walls graffiti-free plays a crucial part in the affective, material and political orderings of the city of light.

Author

• David Pontille, CNRS