Writing the City from Below: Graffiti in Johannesburg

Abstract

Cited as an elusive metropolis, the city of Johannesburg largely resists the imagination. Following on from Lucy Gasser’s (2014) reading of Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys this article considers how graffiti and street art offer ways of “mapping” the city. Focusing on Nuttall and Mbembe’s distinction between surface and depth I argue, through a particular focus on the Westdene Graffiti Project, how street art captures some of the tensions in current South Africa and provides new ways of understanding Johannesburg by meeting a map’s six key functions: getting to know, re-forming boundaries, making exist, reproducing reality, inscribing meaning and establishing patterns of control. The result is a city written from below.

Keywords:

• graffiti
• street art
• mapping
• Johannesburg
• Westdene

Notes on contributor

Tom Penfold is a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. He has published widely on contemporary South African fiction and has recently started a project comparing the performance of national identity in Brazilian and South African literature. In 2017 he published his first monograph, Black Consciousness and South Africa’s National Literature.

Acknowledgements

My gratitude for the comments provided at the CfAR Research Group, where this paper was first presented. Thanks also to Joni van der Westhuizen, Derek Smith and Cale Waddacor, who gave permission to use extracts from his interview portfolio.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The principal aim of outsider graffiti is not to spread a writer’s tag. Such instances can cause tensions in the intensely hierarchical graffiti community between the inner circle of writers who have progressed upwards from tagging and those in the outer circle who have not.

2 The WGP is documented here: http://www.graffitisouthafrica.com/news/2015/09/23/westdene-graffiti-project/.

3 One family asked that no eyes should feature in the design for religious reasons. Other exclusions have included obscenities, skulls and lettering.

4 City of Gold 2015 was “headlined” by the Cape Town graffiti artist Falko and the Australian Adnate. Artists from Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom also attended.