When I walk the streets of the city I go looking at the graffiti and stencil art. It encourages me, it inspires me and most importantly it tells me there is life out there in the cold and mean streets.
The concrete and asphalt tell me nothing. The neatly set gardens are speechless. The drone of traffic and endless parade of cars are dull dull music. All other things I can see are locked, restricted or asking a fee, seeking my money.
The city is a wall, a locked gate, a fence, a barrier. I leave no footprints where I walk, the city barely knows I exist. Maybe the wires pass packets of my data, my transactions in the networks but the streets mostly ignores me.
So the graffiti becomes tracers, signals, messages from the dark, memos from the revolution. The grey is not winning, the concrete did not crush me, conformity will not contain me. Life exists, real life. Unrestricted, untamed, chaotic explosions of creativity, abstract communication, rebellious scribbling.
The characters leap out of the walls, mocking the locks, the restrictions, the rules. Where there is graffiti the streets are speaking to me, asking me 'what's my name?', 'who are you?', 'where are you from?'
