Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Graffiti Removal Verité

this is intriguing.

2 comments:

trainspotter said...

This is soooo cool. And so funny. When I worked for a local human rights group I documented hundreds of racist grafiti, mostly saying:

Neger raus

which means

Negroes out.

Then we came up with the idea of painting them over with:

NORWeger VOraus

which means

Norwegians ahead.

So your link was very much apreciated...

Ms Heather said...

oh, i absolutely love your invention. it's beautiful. and so clever.

i once had a very strange and upsetting dream that someone had made his way into my flat in budapest while i was working for the european roma rights center, and painted vulgar racist graffiti on the walls in deep blood red. there is something so violent in that kind of graffiti, the kind emerging out of hate, or the desire to destroy an object of public interest. i got so angry when i saw someone had painted the face of anonymous in the varosliget.

i have ambivalence about the other kinds, when it is a creative image that appears on a blank concrete wall. i appreciate the subversiveness of it, and the transformation of an increasingly privatized world into a public forum for expression. the title of this post comes from a documentary film about graffiti called "Graffiti Verite" that we watched in the Anthropology course I've been teaching.