The Material Politics of Graffiti Removal

While anti-graffiti policies have been examined in various places, the concrete conditions of graffiti removal remain largely unexplored.Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article considers a generative dimension of graffiti removal techniques and highlights their contribution to the visual ordering of urban reality through two main actions: making differences and making similarities.Anything but automatic and simple, graffiti removal is a complex operation consisting of technical gestures and ontological re-specifications, which are accomplished within the material entanglements of the city's surfaces.A matter of continuous transformations, graffiti removal participates, like graffiti writing, in the visual becoming of urban ecologies.