Housing isn’t affordable anywhere. And gentrification and displacement are phenomena everywhere. At least in what’s called North America.

So this graffiti could be anywhere and everywhere.

Yet there’s something particularly heartening when tagging takes on a homespun flair and speaks with a regional vernacular. As if spray paint, in its own humble way, can conjure a sense of place, a sense of home, that can’t be commodified. That in fact, is at cross-purposes with capitalism’s homogenizing logic, where the local vernaculars of how people have built housing for their own use and of their own crafting that fit the social and ecological contexts for millennia get demolished, and in their places rise up profit-based boxes of gray and glass condos.

So this graffiti, with its down-to-earthness, slang, and misspelling, captures something of the Midwest, including the rust-belt rage over the material abandonment and climate devastation that hit here many decades ago now. Rising rents and hipster art galleries and all the other trappings of this contemporary wave of theft and dispossession have come more slowly here in the flyover land. But make no mistake, it is here too—in this place being remade into a brutal copycat of the “property is theft” that is rearing its head anywhere and everywhere.

#MakeArtMakeTrouble
#ReappropriateOurWorld
#LandBack #HousingForAll
#CommonsNotCapitalism
#ArtOfResistance

Gentrification ruins everything.

Or aspires to.

Among other thefts and displacement, it steals what is formerly subversive, transforms it into edgy-hip, then sanitizes and disappears the real deal to lure in the rich who want to feel “safe,” replacing it with a tamed, sanctioned, peppy-happy-vacuous stimulation.

I keep walking past this street art on the unceded lands of Tio’tia:ke in so-called Montreal. It’s in a neighborhood called “Little Italy” that now has few Italians, and a decreasing amount of graffiti and other rebel redecorating.

It pleases me to read it’s tag—“Oh no! Graffiti!”—against the grain, or maybe with the double meaning intended by its maker, @lost.claws (with their signature image of a skull, as if themselves either grieving all that’s being destroyed here, playing with the ephemerality of everything including art, or underscoring how human systems like capitalism kill off all that’s life-giving).

The tag could be directed at those who buff walls and think they can control them, either to keep those walls whitewashed or set up some fancy city-approved mural festival to deaden the wall with pretty, apolitical pictures. Or those who just paid a pretty price for a renovated apartment nearby and now feel “violated.” (Oh no, NOT graffiti!?!) Thus it could be a “fuck you” to capitalist upscaling, and what and who it dispossesses.

I prefer to read it from another angle, because I mourn the fact that on each return to this diasporic “home” of mine, there’s palpably less and less scrappy and/or militant and/or in-your-face and/or anarchistic street art, and more and more blank walls or wheat-pasted advertisements. To me, it cries out joyfully, “Oh no! Oh yes! It’s still possible to do graffiti! Hehe!”

There are always cracks in every wall. And some paint too.

#MakeArtMakeTrouble
#ArtOfResistance