How will you consume city's artistic side?
You remember the first time you smelt it, the high that got your blood penetrating through your veins, the adrenaline that got your heart rate propelling. You remember touching it, the rough uneven surface grazing your nearly raw fingertips while the colour absorbed through the infinite indents found in your human flesh. You remember hearing it, the comforting sound of creativity and originality exiting your soul. You remember seeing it, someone’s past in a simple intricate word laced with speckles of luminosity.
It’s just a scribble they said, nothing but a form of reckless vandalism, nothing but a bored teenager. Or is it? Did you ever stop to think that that inferior scribble could mean the world to somebody? That that scribble might tell a story of a disturbed teenager yearning to be heard but whose words are over shadowed by the more ‘important’ things the city has to say? The city’s walls become a canvas and these scribbles become a story. These scribbles are the start to something beautiful. Just like a child learns to draw through scribbles, these reckless marks that are etched deep into the city’s walls are the beginning of a story, a story that our city is craving to tell you.
He gets out of bed in the death of night ready to face his troubled mind. He runs down the dark alleyways with a spray can in one hand and his soul in the other, as adrenaline slowly begins to take over. His past is numbed by daylight but at night it begins to take over. Graffiti is his only outlet, his only escape, if only society knew that he thinks to himself, if only they understood. He passes scribbled walls, walls that contain pieces of his own heart and past. He passes a park, the park where he himself destroyed a girl’s life, stripping her of her dignity and value, a park where his own daughter was conceived, a daughter who will never know her own father, a father who got caught up in a gang, a gang who killed innocent people. As he sits on a nearby swing he questions where his childhood went, he questions why his mother loved injecting herself with numbing substances more than she loved the spitting image of herself, he questions who is father could be and wonders if he would be proud of his son, he questions if there is any hope left in this world, any hope at all. He grows tired of questioning. He passes the brothel where his mother used to work, he thinks how selfish it was for a mother to let an 8 year old witness such things, he remembers mommy’s boss who used to remove all his clothes and touch him inappropriately when she was ‘busy’, he shivers at the thought. He passes the bottle store where he used to work in his teenage years to support his mother’s addiction; he hated her addiction but loved her too much to let it take her. He passes his school where he wishes he had finished his education, instead of raping girls to be accepted into a gang. His feet grow tired as he reaches a new fresh piece of wall. It reminds him of a crisp new piece of canvas, a perfect space to tell his story, one of pain and suffering. If only he knew how to read and write. He removes the lid and begins to spray. He breathes in allowing the aerosol to fill his lungs, this is his drug, and this feeling is his high. He is in a trance of emotion and pain as the paint reaches the clean white surface; he has no control as his mind takes over. He stops and takes a step back. What remains, is a simple scribble, a scribble he hopes his city understands.
These scribbles that are found around your city represent more than just teenage rebellion but speak words of growth and suffering. Each scribble has a meaning, each scribble represents a past. So, how will you consume it? How will you ingest your city’s scribbled walls?
