Ferguson, New Orleans and Cairo: The Roots and Routes of Conflict Graffiti

• In Event: Circuits of Graphic Protest

Abstract

During a conflict, graffiti becomes part of the architecture of the conflict itself, ephemeral artifacts that allow us insight into the way protest movements react to their built environments, using spray paint as ideological weapons of the weak. Each graffito on each wall in each city, therefore, speaks to a particular conflict—to understand individual utterances is to contextualize the roots and routes of that conflict.

This talk interweaves two particular stories—graffiti created during the two weeks and two days of the active Ferguson protests and the graffiti produced in the weeks after hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. In both instances, graffiti images were used by print and social media as visual symbols of cities suddenly out of control. But a deeper investigation, however, shows that the graffiti were often nuanced textured accusations of racism that rooted the conflict in a history of State sanctioned violence against black and poor people. While the calamities and geography are vastly different among these two conflicts, much can be learned in the way individuals reacted to their built environments to spread resistive messages in similar, impulsive, and combative direct action. Comparing these U.S based instances of resistance to global moments of conflict graffiti resistance and the narratives of numerous writers who were on the front lines of a violent confrontation—focusing specifically on Cairo in 2011—I argue that to understand popular protest at the moment of crisis, we need to examine what people are writing on the walls.

Graffiti is often built upon layers. One person writes a graffito and, eventually, another will write over that one. What forms is a palimpsest with each layer building upon the other. Often, though, the early paint bleeds through the newer ones and the result is an intermixing of graffitos from different times and places (called “ghosting”). If you stand close and look for this intermixing, you could identify and follow each individual graffito trace. If you take a few steps back, however, one larger intricate piece emerges. My talk follows this same trajectory. While there are three distinct moments I will discuss, each graffiti protest has roots and/or routes in the others.

In the last three years, I have travelled to a number of cities in the United States, Europe and the MENA region to explore how graffiti writers/artists have reacted to significant crises in their cities: New York, Detroit, Ferguson, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Chicago, Philadelphia; Berlin, Malmo, London, Derry, Belfast; Lebanon, Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Ramallah. This talk interweaves this ethnographic research into the larger understanding of the role of protest graffiti in the life cycle of a conflict.

Author

• John Lennon, University of South Florida