Life After Death: Memory and Memorials in Graffiti

Life After Death: Memory and Memorials in Graffiti

Memorials are canonical within graffiti. As a subculture in which kinship and community play critical roles, both small-scale ‘Rest in Peace’ tributes and large-scale remembrance walls have been part of the graffiti vernacular since the earliest days of the culture. Yet whilst these overt practices of public memorialisation are incredibly powerful on both a cultural and artistic level, public artefacts whose affectivity and local impact is hard to understate, this talk will focus on a more modest, yet equally important example of memorial graffiti.

Exploring the continuing production of graffiti tags pronouncing a deceased writer’s name, written by kin / fellow crew members following a writer’s death, it will be the external dissemination of life after death that these epitaphs enable, as well as the internal preservation of memory that the act of writing these names ensures, that will here be unpacked. Exploring the ways graffiti both adheres to and differs from traditional memorial art and the differing conceptions of monumentality it provokes, the talk will thus aim to both challenge many of the commonplace (and inaccurate) assumptions about graffiti whilst simultaneously challenging normative assumptions about contemporary memory culture itself.

Bio:

Dr Rafael Schacter is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Material Culture at University College London and head of the Material Culture subsection. Working on public and global art, Schacter has both an academic and public practice and writes and curates widely in both these fields. His fourth monograph, Monumental Graffiti, was published with MIT Press in October 2024. Schacter has curated exhibitions at sites such as the Tate Modern, Somerset House, and the Brunei Gallery in London, and has given keynote lectures at institutions including The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the Tate Modern in London, Green Papaya in Manila, and The Frei University in Berlin. For more, please see www.rafaelschacter.com.

[Image: Manik13, RIP Ozone, 2013. London. Photo: Rafael Schacter.]