Lately I’ve found my gaze wandering to post-its on lamp-posts, graffiti, illegally put-up posters for events, transient notices of private services on public display. A whole phantasmagoria of desires, feelings, promises, services, actions and events find expression in this form of communication.
I was reminded of all of this recently whilst on vacation in Gran Canaria. The scenery was as spectacular as only an accident of nature can make possible — the rolling beaches, the spectacular sunsets on the horizon; the bougainvillea, hibiscus and bird of paradise flowers peeking through bushes, the sand-dunes. What was on or around nature, however, was as ugly as only greedy and thoughtless human intervention can make it: indistinct blocks of flats and malls, all higgledy piggledy and vying for space as close to the beach as possible; every trace of man’s work a blot on the landscape.
Gran Canaria is where the working classes of Northern Europe go on holiday. Most buildings seem in need a new coat of paint and the cons were only mod circa 1975. There’s a desperate gaiety about the place, like it’s New Year’s Eve year-round; all that expense must result in a good time and sex must be found to go with the sun and the sea or the holiday will be a bust; there’s a grim determination to not fail at having fun; and this provision of fun and sex and cheerfulness is what the place and people who work there are meant to provide.
At the ‘Restaurante El Gran Obrero/ The Great Worker’s Restaurant’, however, the talk is not of the provision of pleasure for the tourist trade but of the problems the locals are having in just getting by; and one overhears the same ramblings here as one does throughout the Spanish mainland : ‘Rajoy, robo por que soy/ I am Rajoy, therefore I rob,’ says one. ‘But it doesn’t matter who’s in power. They’re all crooks.’ ‘You wouldn’t say that if your husband lost his job and they took away your pension’. ‘Don’t worry about me, I ‘d steal a sack of lentils and I’d get by better than I do now’.
The dissatisfactions of the locals and the illicit desires of the tourists find a common if surreptitious and illicit home in the graffiti, posters and post-its that adorn the walls and lampposts of the place. There’s a forlorn air to most of them, as when the poster advertising the promised pleasure is for an event now past. They’ve at one time been hopeful: how many people turned up to that march against Capitalism now past? Will anyone actually get on that website and organize a boycott against Repsol’s despoliation? Many continue to be scary: the praise for Franco and Fascism that is silenced in the mainstream but finds too recurrent an expression darkening whitewashed walls throughout Spain; the more local appeal to the Ultras of Frankfurt to work towards the ancient promise of victory.
Often they evoke cheapness – producers that don’t have the means to draw an audience’s attention in other ways – or tawdryness – the drawing of attention to something that has to be done surreptitiously or in hiding. Or mere fun: ‘stop texting me’!
These roiling murmurings, by their very nature liminal and interstitial, reward attention in every guise. They speak of silenced conversations, disbelief, dissatisfactions, dissidence, all roiling up to the surface, expressing another point of view, sometimes in fun, sometimes in anger, even if only to hit a wall or a lamppost near you, all asking for change, most succeeding in changing only the surface you’re looking at. There’s a power in this mode of expression, one that is particularly interesting in that it’s drawn entirely from impotence
The saddest bit of graffiti I came across was a scrawled note on a white wall, at shoulder height, large enough to call attention to itself, but written with a hurry that nonetheless suggest an element of clandestinity. The literal translation reads as follows ‘Today, Thursday 8th of May 2014, I shall commit suicide at 4h25. My life is worth nothing and the only thing I have is suffering. I ask of God that he forgive me’.
Is the note real? What makes a person want to write it, even if it’s not. Did the person go through with the act? If they didn’t, why didn’t they come back to erase it? If the person did go through with it, did anybody they knew come across the note? What despair does this note speak of? Is the despair lessened by the person still being alive? These are depressing times, austere times, even in spite of, or particularly in the light of so much sunshine and colour. The Graffitti tells a story rather different than the brochure, no less interesting, and best read alongside it.
José Arroyo