Graffiti is back in town: Critical approaches to visual and spatial practices in Berlin

Abstract

The article considers the critical potential of both graffiti and street art using Berlin as an example, where these forms of urban creativity have flourished. It offers an interdisciplinary, context-related analysis by combining visual and spatial theories, which highlight both their critical agency as well as their affirmative potential in processes of gentrification. In this way, the study takes up the question of Avramidis and Tsilimpounidi about what graffiti and street art actually do in urban space. Thus, they are understood as spatial and visual forms of critique and protest, as also historic positions within the discourses on architecture and the city show, where graffiti, in particular, appears as a critical term. This applies to the general notion of graffiti being a confrontation with the capitalist system and its hegemonic spectacle, as well as the abject view, comparing them with dirt within a racist discourse. Finally, these contestations of and within the democratic city dissolve themselves in the post-urban paradigm. This implies a notion of the city under complete private ownership and control where there is no place for dialectics anymore and the ‘urban’ is seen as a threat to society.