Samuel Merrill

Keeping it real? Subcultural graffiti, street art, heritage and authenticity

This article considers the implications of framing subcultural graffiti and street art as heritage. Attention is paid to subcultural graffiti’s relationship to street art and the incompatibility of its traditions of illegality, illegibility, anti-commercialism and transience with the formalised structures of heritage frameworks. It is argued that the continued integration of street art and subcultural graffiti into formal heritage frameworks will undermine their authenticity and mean that traditional definitions of heritage, vandalism and the historic environment will all need to be revisited. The article contributes to the current re-theorisation of heritage’s relationship with erasure by proposing that subcultural graffiti should be perceived as an example of ‘alternative heritage’ whose authenticity might only be assured by avoiding the application of official heritage frameworks and tolerating loss in the historic environment.

Graffiti at Heritage Places: Vandalism as Cultural Significance or Conservation Sacrilege?

Abstract Current heritage best practice aims to avoid strategies that focus solely on single, often arbitrary periods or narratives in a sites history in favor of those that recognize all of the sites layers of significance. This situation was born from similar concerns to those that made archaeology critically self reflect and adopt positions that attempted to overcome inherent preconceptions and biases. However, the treatment of forms of vandalism at heritage sites, such as graffiti, often stands in juxtaposition to the sites other layers of significance and reveals that heritage management is yet to address all of its own biases. This article discusses the cultural significance of graffiti vandalism at heritage sites. It argues that new ways of theorizing about heritage and its destruction are required and that heritage management should adopt perspectives akin to archaeologys post-processualism in order to ensure that the significance of contemporary graffiti vandalism is not lost by strategies that view it primarily as conservation sacrilege. To do this, the article considers the origin, definition, and types of heritage vandalism before focusing on graffiti in relation to three case studies and then examining the relevant perspectives that archaeological and heritage theory can offer. The article aims to provide a further departure point from which to discuss the significance of vandalism at heritage places and in particular graffiti and its treatment.

Exploring Hidden Narratives: Conscript Graffiti at the Former Military Base of Kummersdorf

This article explores the cultural significance and interpretative potential of graffiti left by Soviet conscripts at Kummersdorf, a former military base in the German federal state of Brandenburg. The graffiti is framed as war art and its typology, distribution and content is studied in detail. In this way opportunities for further research are highlighted, as well as the potential for the graffiti to contribute to interpretative and conservation strategies. We demonstrate how the graffiti embodies multi-level interpretative narratives which can help to reveal hidden aspects of Soviet conscript life and cultural practices whilst alluding to global events and Soviet and Russian military policy. More generally, the article aims to promote the potential of graffiti and other forms of what is traditionally considered vandalism to contribute to the cultural significance and interpretation of heritage sites.

Looking forward to the past: London Underground's 150th anniversary

This paper takes a look at the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the London Underground (LU) in 2013, as well as a look back in history at past commemorations and the place that the LU has held in London society.

The London Underground Diagram: Between Palimpsest and Canon

Abstract This paper demonstrates how the London Underground Diagram can be characterized as both palimpsest and canon, contributing to the collective memory and identity of London as a representational component of the cultural landscape of the London Underground. It explicitly considers the processes that have determined the increasing canonization of the diagram and the normative past that it embodies since its inception in 1931 by: investigating its design history and context of success; reviewing its popular iconization and the official acknowledgement of its origins; highlighting the history of its copyright and commercialization; charting the creative phenomenon of map-mashing and its copyright consequences; and questioning the diagram’s status in a continuing digital world.

The rhythms of social movement memories : the mobilization of Silvio Meier’s activist remembrance across platforms

ABSTRACT This article presents a temporal analysis of the activist remembrance of Silvio Meier, a prominent member of Berlin’s radical left scene, who was stabbed to death in 1992. It asks: when has Meier’s activist remembrance occurred and been remediated, with what rhythms, and how has it been influenced by different platforms? To answer these questions, the article draws on the literature dedicated to the interface between social movements and collective and connective memory, and applies Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis approach. Within this approach a diverse set of material is used to visualise the timing of the digital and non-digital remediation and mobilisation of Meier’s remembrance across different platforms of memory including commemorative events, newspapers, websites and social media. Thereafter the various temporalities of use associated with these platforms and how they can influence the mobilisation of remembrance by social movements is discussed using Lefebvre’s concepts of polyrhythmia, arrhythmia, isorhythmia, eurhythmia and with respect to, firstly, a fifteen-year period between 2002 and 2017 and secondly, a fifteen-day period between 15 November and 30 November 2012 around the twentieth anniversary of Meier’s death. The article concludes by introducing another Lefebvrian concept – dressage – in order to consider which rhythms of activist remembrance might most benefit social movements and their goals. Overall, by demonstrating the importance of attending to the when and not only the what, who, where and how of social movement memories and by highlighting the need to consider the temporal influence of the different digital and non-digital platforms that activists use, as well as, by indicating the broader potential of applying rhythmanalysis approaches to instances of activism, the article has broader relevance for the further study of social movements, their use of different media and their mobilization of memory.

The Dead Are Coming: Political Performance Art, Activist Remembrance and Dig(ital) Protests

This chapter approaches the work of the Berlin-based Centre for Political Beauty [Zentrum Politische Schonheit] (CPB) with respect to the notion of ‘activist citizenship’. It considers one of the CPB’s political artworks—The Dead Are Coming [Die Toten Kommen]—which took place in June 2015, in terms of the politics of public mourning and contextualises it against a deeper genealogy of the performative use of digging as a form of protest in Berlin connected to the active remembrance of Germany’s negative twentieth-century past. In turn, the chapter argues that The Dead Are Coming not only represented an ‘act of citizenship’ but also a form of ‘activist remembrance’‚ which involved processes of mediatised performative commemoration. This emergent genre of commemoration is then introduced in more detail, before some of its digital gestural remains are mapped in order to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the artwork.

Standing Up for Sweden? : The Racist Discourses, Architectures and Affordances of an Anti-Immigration Facebook Group

Facebook has faced growing criticism regarding its handling of hateful user-generated content(UGC) with research revealing how the platform can foster both covert and overt racism. Thisresearch has ...

“Beachten Sie die Lücken”: Reviewing the Cultural Histories and Geographies of Public Transport in Berlin

In Berlin’s U-Bahn an announcement cautions passengers: “Bitte beachten Sie beim Aussteigen die Lucke zwischen Zug und Bahnsteigkante.” This fastidious rendition of the London Underground’s “mind ...

Walking together? The mediatised performative commemoration of 7/7’s tenth anniversary

This article investigates the #WalkTogether initiative which commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 7 July 2005 London bombings by encouraging people to individually re-enact and share on social media the moment when following the bombings, in the absence of a functioning public transport network, Londoners walked to and from work together. It asks what forms of togetherness did the initiative promote and what was the role of professional journalists and news organisations in facilitating this togetherness? To answer these questions, the article conceives of togetherness as hybrid and unfolding within broader media and memory ecologies. This encourages the use of innovative combinations of methods and the introduction of the concepts of ‘mediatised performative commemoration’ and ‘digital gestural remains’. In turn, this allows a number of specific enquiries into the characteristics of #WalkTogether’s commemoration, communities, remembrance and reporting a decade after 7/7 took place and a discussion of the extent to which the initiative resulted in forms of clicktivism and commemorative silos.