THE RIGHT TO THE SURFACE IS THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
Images like this are like a pluri-vocal whisper reminding me of the energy of urban togetherness, in all its messy, smelly, disorderly forms. One of my Leake Street photographs has been featured on the cover of the Visual Studies journal (Vol 36, Issue 1, 2021). You can see the cover on their website and read …
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“Power, Paint and Public Walls” was my six-day endeavour with Sprya Sharma and 25 students from CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India. Taught online under an intensive "winter school" format, the course aimed to develop a multidisciplinary reading of contemporary cities by examining walls, surfaces, graffiti, street art, advertising and other types of wall writing. The …
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I will be teaching a week-long winter course at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India (well, online) with my colleague Sprya Sharma. Sprya is an architect who has been researching wall drawings in her region (particularly the fascinating Madhubani paintings), and the two of us work with similar wall-reading tools, which we are going to bring …
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I wrote a short article for U+I Think, about how to imagine a heritage culture of movement and change, by learning from graffiti. "Having written a PhD on graffiti – my friends call me Dr Wall – one of my most important takeaways is this: colour and beauty are not intrinsically valuable for cities. Yet …
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UPDATE: Guardian Cities released a new article on 7 January 2015 following from the Graffiti Sessions conference: Is urban graffiti a force for good or evil? Read the piece by Athlyn Cathcart-Keays here. I feel exhausted, grateful and anxious about the great responsibilities we were left with after the Graffiti Sessions event, both as a team …
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The graffiti research scene in Australia in general and Melbourne in particular has attracted my attention for a number of years, through the published work of Alison Young (and her co-authored papers with Mark Halsey), Kurt Iveson, Lachlan MacDowall, Kim Dovey (especially through his collaborative research on graffiti with Simon Wollan and Ian Woodcock - available here and …
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