216 pages Text(s) by Yves Pagès Designed by Atelier Philippe Bretelle 25 x 17,9 cm Language: French Paperback Publisher: La Découverte 2017
The tradition of writing on walls did not come to an end with May ’68: the recent protests against the labor law have proved as much, leaving numerous inspired aphorisms throughout the urban landscape. Drawing from his personal collection, Yves Pagès presents 4,000 graffiti transcribed word for word, encountered between June 1968 and 2017, each documented by location, date, and method of execution. From Paris to Berlin, via Tahrir Square, walls may lack ears, but they certainly have plenty to say.
We say that walls have ears, but do we know that they whisper? Those who, since the mid-nineteenth century, have illegally taken to leaving their mark on them—with chalk, charcoal, felt-tip pen, brush, or spray can—have understood this well: walls speak to us. With their gruff irony, thwarted hopes, and abrupt flights of fancy, they echo words buried deep within us. They carry words that, written there without a destination or a legitimate place, are exposed to every passer-by and “contaminate” public space, disrupting the established order of discourse.
Yves Pagès wild and joyful collection of texts—more than 4,000 urban graffiti from around the world, spanning the past fifty years, faithfully transcribed, dated, and located—forms a unique record. A record of the contagious joy of a good line, the free energy of political expression, small acts of audacity, minor and fleeting poetry, the margins of syntax, awkward invention, and the pleasure of the unfinished. This book can be devoured chronologically, explored through wandering associations of ideas, mined for one’s own personal anthology, or simply opened at random and left to the chance of an exquisite corpse
