Erasing Graffiti, Erasing History: Purging Gezi Park Graffiti from Public Walls and Collective Memory

In late spring 2013, activists spray-painted the walls and rolling commercial side-doors of a building on Taksim Square. I later photographed their remonstrations while municipality workers rolled broad strokes of paint over graffiti, doors, signage, and walls, alike. During activists’ Gezi Park occupation and after their eviction, protester-police standoffs and confrontations continued most evenings for weeks at the adjacent square and along neighborhood streets. The following mornings, maintenance crews returned to clean resulting debris, sow grass and flowers in the off-limits park, and paint with rollers most surfaces throughout the quarter, both vertical and horizontal. New graffiti appeared each night, and workers returned each day; the district looked progressively more like a document undergoing extreme redaction than restoration.

Historical, art, urban, and social movement scholarship concerning graffiti demonstrate clearly how what many regard as vandalism nonetheless may constitute alternative perspectives and vital accounts and assertions of identity, territoriality, and contestation. As such, it renders unique vantages for viewing and assessing state-society relations, struggles for recognition, dynamics of policing, and reassertions of authority. Enabled by unintended fieldwork during the Gezi protests and research conducted thereafter, I utilize this poster to demonstrate how not only graffiti function as political texts subject to contemporary and historical analysis; subsequent effacements render political transcripts, as well.

Though the act of erasure is normative—as are judicial outcomes that entail misdemeanors, fines, and remuneration, policing typically does not extend to acts of recollection and reproduction (e.g., in media, though not in situ). In Erdoğan’s post-Gezi Turkey, however, criminalization of graffiti began to entail repetition of its content in written word and its preservation and dissemination through photographic, published, or electronic media imagery. Presenting examples of transgressions in the public sphere that are both popular and authoritarian, I document this phenomenon and associated efforts to purge and collective memories and reshape a history popular resistance. Moreover, I analyze it as one vital aspect of a state’s descent from democratic republic to populist dictatorship; a shift with innumerable contemporary analogues.