As part of Amplify: Story, Resistance, Radio, David Nichols of This Must Be The Place podcast interviews Sabina Andron - a cities scholar specializing in creative and transgressive public cultures, with a specific interest in the semiotics of urban walls and surfaces. Sabina is the author of “Urban Surfaces, Graffiti and the Right to the City”, to be published in 2024.
Although graffiti (or “stuff on walls”) is shorthand to describe Sabina’s research, it’s not really a fair description – Sabina’s interest is in documenting and understanding how urban culture articulates itself onto the visible surfaces of cities. In trying to understand cities by reading walls and surfaces, Sabina spends a lot of time walking around noticing the urban forms of relatively humble streets and walls, but more broadly studies both endorsed and illegal forms of markings as well as how surfaces are managed, regulated, maintained and cleaned. Sabina started in photographic documentary methods, but is also trying to pay attention in different ways of seeing urban surfaces, such as written note taking. She has recently filled a notebook with all the names mentioned in the Brunswick stretch of Sydney Road. Many of these are ubiquitous but unnoticed corporate and security signs – text that is permitted or sometimes required in urban space. People notice tags, but “there is so much of everything as well, we just don’t question them – we should challenge that because it is about who has a right to be visible”.
As well as international examples and context, Sabina offers observations on Melbourne – for example, its rich outdoor poster culture, it’s laneways both touristed and otherwise, its pride in certain forms of street art but also its policies focused on order – Melbourne’s Mayor, for example, holding a pressure cleaning to reassure people “how important it is to keep the city clean”.
The discussion covers graffiti as cultural and artistic discourse, the relatively recent criminalisation of graffiti, David’s short career in train vandalism at age 15,
the material ecologies of things like posters (side notes – small birds seem to eat the paste, right? Or is it just Liz that thinks that?), murals versus graffiti, City Square’s “graffiti wall” which was basically a whiteboard, photographic books of graffiti (including the popular 1970s Australian volumes of ‘witty’ examples), the visual and cultural language of graffiti and how train tags came to be seen as an unsettling signal of decay, graffiti removal companies, coatings, designs that actively prevent damage from spray paints, and how Melbourne discourse, as in many places, tends to hate graffiti but love street art.
Music venue The Tote in Collingwood has sound restrictions based on vibrations that might damage the paint on the Keith Haring mural next to it – a 1984 mural preserved at substantial cost, as a community symbol. Although Serena asks - why are some things symbols and for whom? “We should perhaps start valuing the collective meaning and force of our capacity to write on walls”.
Also discussed is a recent Fitzroy residents’ meeting about graffiti – how the vehement dislike of tagging uses the language of viral invasion, and of threat and disorder. David wonders whether Fitzroy residents still fear the sanctioned “white anting” of the Housing Commission and Freeway construction days of the mid 20th century. Sabina argues graffiti often is read as an invasive threat, as the sign of a disordered environment, but that there are other kinds of threats – to civic rights and access to space - from a clean and ordered environment. The discussion is about specific places and surfaces – but “I think we are a bit naïve if we think that the form is the most important aspect of this conversation. It’s more about our right to occupy space”.
