Graffiti Culture Roma
by Tom and Lisa Dowling
Graffiti Culture Roma as a book is available at www.blurb.com
For a big-city American, experiencing Rome is a lesson in humility. Los Angelinos think they’ve got the corner on crazy traffic, inscrutable signs, hostile or crazy neighbors, and the most eclectic array of gastronomic delights. While living in Rome in the fall of 2006 on sabbatical, we learned very quickly Roman auditory, gustatory, and graphic overload compares to L.A. in way no simile can capture. Rome is like no other.
During our travels we had to finish a project on Baroque churches, but along the way we were enticed by the images we were encountering outside the grand edifices of the historical buildings. Graffiti was a constant pull back into the modern day, a contrast of color against ancient stones, an enigma, and a challenge to the idea of beauty that we were chasing.
We are mostly used to the notion of graffiti in Los Angeles. We see it on freeway retaining walls and in some alleyways in the inner cities and think it to be a part of some counterculture, some perversion of expression, or the demarcations indicative of the animalistic turf wars created by rival gangs. In Rome, we found that graffiti is pervasive and as layered as the strata of civilizations upon which the city was built. Graffiti and its counterparts – pochoir, tagging, wheat paste, stickers, and scratching – adorn myriad surfaces from trains to trees. It says everything from Kill the Fascists & America, Follow your Dreams, to Rome is #1. And how can one argue with any of it? Where else do they have to express contempt at being overrun by tourists, being overwhelmed by history, being expected to excel with elegance at all arts and sciences, at the notion of technology usurping the gravitas of their past?
When we first began photographing them, the scrawls seemed to be an inelegant counterpoint to the beauty, silence, and deliberate art and architecture of the churches that we had been studying. Then the thought dawned to document the graffiti for its visual interest, literally capturing images in an act of ownership not unlike the artist who claimed the surface as his or her own. There is a long history of claiming public domain for personal expression, and the Romans in the district of Trastevere seem to be particularly adept at this phenomenon. Most of the images in this book were taken in the environs of Trastevere, as most of the large graffiti is eradicated quickly over in the ultra-touristy, high-dollar city center. We made a conscious attempt to stay “above ground” as well, ignoring for the most part the deep stone valley that the Tiber River embankment creates. That “subterranean” graffiti is mostly the work of the homeless, angry, or bored, and generally does not reflect the high-profile statements of those willing to risk the run-in with the unforgiving police.
While in Los Angeles we make attempts to cover graffiti up with neutral tones to match the affronted cinderblock walls, in Rome they mostly ignore it and let it layer until the stone or stucco has become a palimpsest of color and message. Rome would be truly beautiful without it, and yet has never existed without its presence. Ancient and modern Pompeii had forms of it, with the latter manifested as ghostly handprints left in dust along a commercial wall. Italians MUST mark, it seems.
The various methods of graffiti became more apparent as we got deeper into the project, and we have delineated the five styles as such: 1) graffiti: large, colorful, abstract well-known graffiti artists’ initials or “group” names or symbols that attempt to be artful and rarely overlap other markings 2) tagging: stylized lettering of single color names or scrawls that mark anywhere, including defacing graffiti 3) pochoir: a French method (with recent British converts) of images that are made with a stencil and give thought to background color and image contrast; never overlaps other markings until someone defaces it 4) scratching: using sharp objects to deface by gouging initials or words into available surface, from trees to moss to stucco to tires; almost always defaces all other graffiti forms 5) stickers and wheat paste: a form of tagging in which materials are adhered to surfaces to create a “brand” of the artist.
Through our lens we hoped to find what beauty we could in an art form that is misunderstood and scorned. Now that auction houses such as Sotheby’s have tapped into the subculture and threaten to gentrify and elevate what is essentially an anti-establishment concept into high art, there may no longer be such sharp dividing lines between the legacy of Van Gogh and NEMO. Recent high-dollar and high profile sales of pochoir stencils and installations of graffiti (an oxymoronic phenomenon) promises to send street rats flocking to initiate virgin buildings in the attempt to become the next Banksy, Blek Le Rat, Miss.Tic or LUCAS. Let’s hope that they leave enough of ancient Rome unadorned so that generations to come may see some unblemished splendor in the Eternal City.
Tom and Lisa Dowling, 2006 |
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