TAG: name writing in public space (2nd edition)

On 14th and 15th September 2017 Edward Birzin and Javier Abarca, both eminent authorities within the field of graffiti related research, organized the first Tag Conference at the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. The hosts managed to bring together an impressive range of scholars, each of them working on partly historic forms of namewriting, which one would not have in mind first, when thinking about graffiti. The two days program included participants from 14 countries, who really opened up a complete new horizon of the variety writing apart from traditional New York graffiti can have in almost thirty exciting lectures.

The book “TAG: name writing in public space – A reader of the 2017 conference about tagging at Freie Universität Berlin” features almost all of the conference’s participants with their presented topic. Whether it may be the style and quantity competition of names written on Pompeii walls almost 2000 years ago, the reading of the famous TAKI183 Times article as a Bildungsroman, Joseph Kyselak as world’s first tagger or analysis of tagging on classroom desks: This publication sums up the interesting and unique results of scientific research in a broader spectrum of the global historic namewriting practice.

Table of contents:

• François Chastanet (FR): For a geography of urban signatures, New York globalisation & metropolitan particularities
• Julia Tulke (US): Tags of Crisis: Polysemic Performances on the Wall of Athens
• Konstantina Drakopoulou & Argiro Papathanasiou (GR): The HIT And LIFO Graffiti Crews: Redefining Athens Streets
• Orestis Pangalos (GR): Football, military and adolescent tagging in Greece.
• Vladimir Stekachyov (RU): Cleanliness is next to godliness
• Andreas Dorn (DE): Tagging in the Valley of the Kings around 1300-1050 BC
• Danny Flynn (UK): Invasive tags, Île de la Passe
• Edwige Fusaro (FR): Taggings on classroom desks
• Valeria Federici (IT): The role of tags between place and existence
• Vittorio Parisi (IT): Tags as weapons – Structuralism, Futurism, RAMM:ELL:ZEE and the symbolic war on language
• Elena García Gayo and Calota Santabárbara Morera (ES): Graffiti and the ethics of conservation
• Theo Kindynis (UK): Excavating ghosts: Urban exploration as graffiti archaeology
• Will Shank (US): To tag and to untag: the preservation point of view
• Edward Birzin (US): Taki 183 as Bildungsroman
• Dr Rafael Schacter (UK): Graffiti and Street Art as Ornament¹
• Gabriele Goffriller (AT): Joseph Kyselak (1798-1831) – the world’s first graffiti tagger?
• Polly Lohmann (DE): Tagging in Antiquity: Pompeian Graffiti Between Individuality and Convention
• Pedro Soares (PT): Tagging 22000 years ago, relations between today graffiti and the oldest known open air Paleolithic art complex
• Norbert Kirbach (DE): Tagging, calligraphy and public writing in China
• Jake Carter (AU): Between Inscription & Gesture Accessing high calligraphic culture in the interrelatedness between tagging and traditional practices throughout the East.
• Kadir “Amigo” Memis (DE): Movement of letters
• Jo Preußler (DE): Writing in the air
• Lukas Fuchsgruber: Writing Refractions – Glass Tagging and the Art Histories of Graffiti
• Jean-Baptiste Barra & Timothée Engasser (FR): Marks of erasure: visual, sociological and anthropological looks on the antigraffiti policies in Toulouse (France)
• Tomasz Sikorski (†) (PL): Illegal signs and names in public space in Poland. Three Stories.

The reader’s 2nd edition with a blue screen printed dust jacket was published in December 2022 and is limited to 200 pieces only. For everyone who could not attend the Tag Conference back then, we are glad to offer a small stack of copies now.

246 pages, 20,8 x 29,7 cm, full color and b/w, softcover with blue screen printed transparent dust jacket, 2nd edition of 200
Editors: Edward Birzin, Javier Abarca & Matthias Hübner
Language: English
Release date: December 2022 (May 2022)
Publisher: Possible Books