…they’ll take the penis every time!
Wait, maybe I should backup here for some context. With the realization of bava.studio I now get outside of the house on a daily basis for a commute of 10 minutes on foot each way. I’m a creature of habit, so I pretty much always take the same path, and for almost a year now I’ve seen this graffiti of a penis in front of some new construction:
Random penis graffiti in Trento
It wasn’t particularly remarkable, just another in an endless line of phallic representations of the power structure that everywhere oppresses us. Amen. But it got particularly interesting when just a few days ago a new piece of graffiti was added to the construction fence quickly becoming a street art gallery:
“COMPOST THE RICH” graffiti
Unlike its forebear, this new graffiti captured me in a way that a ho-hum graffiti penis just can’t. The bold font and flower embellish of this statement belied the deeply dark and revolutionary sentiment at the heart of this little missive. It’s a brilliant piece of anti-capitalist, eco-savagery masked as a palatable slogan that just might stick. In fact, while the penis has remained almost a full year unmolested, the “COMPOST THE RICH” graffiti was removed within days.
No More Composting in this gallery, but long live the penis!
The above image was taken this afternoon as I was heading to the studio to try and figure out why the newly socketed Z80 chip on my Scramble board was not working (see next post). It struck me that there was something uneasy about the new addition, it wasn’t just another random scribbling of genitalia hiding in plain site as an incongruous logo. This was a statement that seemed somehow dangerous in its playful humor. And I imagine the owners of this new villa felt that unease even more acutely given how quickly it was “composted.” How do you know art between a penis and the composting of the rich? While I’m no art critic, my money is on the one that needs to be removed posthaste.
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You posted that graffiti photo a few days ago, but it didn’t occur to me until now that it’s not in the native language. Is English graffiti common in Italy?
Good uestion, a ton of graffiti is written in English, so that is definitely not unique. However, speaking English well in Trento (and I imagine most of Italy) suggests education and often class distinctions (which are deeply drawn in the Italian education system), so the writing it in English would be even that much more provocative for the owners of the villa I imagine. In fact, the language question opens up a whole different question around the tension between English as colonizing power and social status marker.