Surprise and thoughts on the graffiti and public art

The choice to add this chapter comes from a desire to seek out a layer of Italy that I perhaps could not have seen if I maintained a tourist lens. It is also due to my own interests and continued research in public art and graffiti that I went out of my way to record all this artwork.

I remember that early on in the course, we were prescribed a reading on Lefebvre’s work by Andrzej Zieleniec, and what had caught my eye was a point made later in the article on the importance of “aesthetic dimension” when creating spaces for and with people (Zieleniec, 2018, 12). In order to appeal to “aesthetic justice” we must view how and why “graffiti writers and street artists […] colonise, appropriate and adorn the streets of towns and cities throughout the world with an alternative aesthetic creating a different semiotic for reading the city” (Zieleniec, 2018, 12).

These artists are telling us all something that we might not typically be allowed to see or should know. Graffiti should not be seen as a stigmatized practice for vandalizing the city purely out of mal intent: it is a means for staking a claim and interrupting some kind of hegemonic urban discourse. It is for this reason I use the scope of representational spaces to try and listen to what the local urban dwellers are claiming, demanding, and anonymously criticizing.

I found there to be clear themes and issues, including relating to anti-fascist remarks, transgender + feminist call outs, disagreement about legislation and artwork showcasing the cultural and racial diversity in Italy, that I had honestly been unaware of previous to the trip.

Confronting the State: Antifa, Anti-Racism, and Anti-homophobia Movements in their Visual Forms

I think seeing these stenciled artworks, the Peace Pride flags and so on were unexpected. I say this because I think my idea of Italy was that of a more homogenously conservative culture in an older generation, but a more 'liberal' youthful demographic. But I think like any political myth, one cannot split up society in such a way, and like many European countries, as well as North American populations, we see a polarization that is undeniable and a desire to naturalize problematic ideas like heteronormativity. To see these aesthetic landmarks so bluntly in areas that were ancient in some way made for quite the contrast. Regardless of the language barrier, I could understand what was being claimed simply because of the traversing effect of artwork and universal symbols. And these symbols probably act as permanent claims to movements that aren't always visible or on the surface, so in the place of protest or rallies, they act as haunting reminders of the undeniable.

Anti-Fascism Graffiti in Bologna

Another symbol I found quite common was this split/arrow symbol and the red flag symbol. The image below was in Bologna and was a profound piece taking up the whole corner of this university building. All I inferred when seeing it was that (1) it related to occupying space/protesting in some way (perhaps with student involvement), (2) the blood red color might have been an association with a communist/Marxist perspective (or maybe just anti-capitalist) and (3) that from my other encounters with similar symbols and the letters ANTIFA scrolled further down the block, that this was an anti-fascist call. Actually, I should credit a friend who first mistook ANTIFA for a violent/extreme group, and then we both had the light-bulb moment that it was a shorter way of writing "ANTIFASCISTA" in Italian. 

After some digging, the flag symbol seems to originate from anti-fascist movements throughout the European region, including Germany, and seems to be a general call to split with and de-naturalize the reproduced tendencies of Fascism that, I think we all tend to forget, saw their emergence here in Italy. This is just a guess, but combining this with the clear aggravations made by the right wing government, there seems to be an anger towards the justification or little persecution towards political groups and people who incite fascist, racist, and discriminatory language and ideas. It's strange that, although the context and historical variegation is different, it still largely is comparable with the issues we see in North America, especially in the wake of Trumpian politics. 

I love this piece for many reasons. One, I love the way it interrupts the visuals of the area, and unlike a smaller writing that could be quickly erased or whitewashed (which I OFTEN saw), it takes up the whole space, and has a more positive and regenrative rhetoric as it calls on the community. Additionally, the piece confirms what I might not always know for sure, which is that there is an issue of racism, especially as I came to see many refugee or immigrant families, and that gentrifcation is also a clear issue, and one that I predict is related to how space is commodified for touristic infrastructure, not for the people who live here. I think being in this southern part of the city was sobering, since it felt more alive with locals and 'normal' day to day life, and so it is ehre we cna p[erhaps get a better idea for what is under the surface.

The Contention between Fascist and ANTIFA Graffiti

Other pieces relating to several (globalized) movements

The 75th anniversary of the Nakba that had taken place on May 15th 1948 would mean that I had certainly expected some semblance or sign of the protests or just Palestinians in these Italian cities, and I wasn't wrong. I had only seen such street art in Rome, and there is even one close to Ostello Bello that writes "Free Palestine" and "Palestina Libera", and for which I noticed someone had tried to erase with white spraypaint over top. I didn't picture that one, but I managed to find these as well and wanted to include them. Again, proof of the racial diversity as well as the many causes that are being claimed in this city alone.

Visually pleasing work and Seeking out Patterns

But this is the first time I notice that the writing on the right appears erased, or that someone had attempted to erase it, and the thinner writing on the left seems to be the artist redrawing that writing over the attempted whitewashing. This is one of the many examples of whitewashing I saw when it came to street art, and maybe this isn't a popular opinion, but this artist's work was probably my favorite, perhaps because I couldn't decode it, and yet it seems to have been an annoyance to someone else. It maybe reveals to us how people contest the urban landscape and even take it over without ever really being known or seen.

Seeking out the Artist 

These next pieces don't serve for much analytical content, but I wanted to include these photo entries, because I hoped to share just how obsessively I had been paying attention to the local graffiti, especially in Florence. I was lucky enough to have found this artist online, and I wanted to give credit to his work simply because I think, like all the graffiti and street art I've seen thus far, it served to interrupt the renaissance ryhtm of the city, and return us back to reality and the many artists and even architects who deserve our attention, rather than always turning our heads back to the past and the 'masters' of before.