This week’s readings and discussion invited me to think critically about graffiti in relation to cultural geography. Should we think about production of graffiti in a global context, we are prompted to consider the ways in which space and place are constructed and accessed in differing ways. While the readings for this week brought cases of graffiti in varying contexts into our consciousness, the underlying question of access to space inform my interpretation and comparison of these cases. As Hannah stated in class, decoding the graffiti presented in the text “‘We’ve got better things to do than worry about whitefella politics’: Contemporary Indigenous graffiti and recent government interventions in Jawoyn Country” by Ralph and Smith is telling of the ways certain groups and individuals are able to access and negotiate a relationship to space.
A question that arises for me is: How does infrastructure (or lack of) enable or invite graffiti making? When I consider the ways in which many of the cases we have studied include instances of waiting, I am prompted to consider the words of Carolyn Steedman in Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, in which she argues that “to wait is to want.” Waiting implies a lack––of agency or control over time and action. When we wait in line, we are at the whim of a system of which we are not actants. In applying this idea to the study of graffiti, I can infer that the graffiti made by the horse-lads was produced when they had no control over the weather. They were literally waiting out the storm. Similarly, the graffiti made in Jawoyn County in the article by Ralph and Smith was produced by those waiting for the bus. With no control over its schedule, frequency, urgency––over the transportation infrastructures offered in Jawoyn County––the graffiti writers enacted agency in their inscriptions.
Steedman writes about “what has been made out on the margins”––in the study of graffiti, we might decode the marks made through the narratives they tell of access to space and control over infrastructures. Margins and tensions of agency/actants exist in a global context. How does this same lens of waiting–wanting lend itself to decoding graffiti in global contexts? How does this lens enable the study of subaltern narratives that expose agency despite and through the margins?