To be Seen and to be Felt: Memory and Memorials in Graffiti

Memorials are canonical within graffiti. As not just a visual culture but a subculture in which community is critical, what have been termed “spraycan memorials” have been significant since the form’s earliest days. Yet while these grassroots memorials are valuable on both cultural and artistic levels, this essay will focus on a more concealed commemorative practice present within graffiti. Exploring what I term remembrance tags—public texts pronouncing a deceased writer’s name inscribed by fellow practitioners following the former’s passing—it will be the contradictions these memorials seemingly form that will form the core of this essay. Exploring notions of permanence and transience, presence and absence, intimacy and publicity, visibility and invisibility that remembrance tags bring to the surface—and, in particular, the way they function through both their being seen and being felt—the essay will challenge a range of normative assumptions made about both graffiti and institutional Western memorial culture. Remembrance tags will thus not only be understood to question the structures through which public memorialisation transpires but likewise reveal a commemorative practice functioning through a process- not object-based heritage, through a marginal and monumental practice that is both inscriptive and incorporative at the same time.