Divar
The walls speak. Now, they are asking me to speak as well. I enter an alley, often by mistake I turn right instead of left, in a foreign city. I was in a lot of foreign cities during the war, and once I saw a wall-writing telling me: ‘say death to the king.’ I am told to speak. I look around me. Is the listener waiting?
The wall is stretching a hand out and opening my mouth for once, instead of ordering it closed. I can hear the words forming in my mouth, but I instead feel trapped in the hull of a spiraled shell, one that closes in on itself in repetition. I’ve seen this image before.
I was taking a walk one day and saw one, two, three “Reza”s written on a wall, although the third one had only the “r” and the rest was a question. I see a potential for anagram. ضار. An unsettling anagramming, a micromovement of the words, a near leap into something else. It’s so close to turning into something else, convulsing into a nexus of historical process and landscape. Contingency lies in the palm of my hand, but it’s so sweaty it slips right off again.
“The wall is stretching a hand out and opening my mouth, for once, instead of ordering it closed.”
Wall-writing or graffiti? Graffiti is usually a critique written in hiding, but for a public forum. Half the point is there not being an author, you can’t reveal who you are. Then it becomes about the message and its spreadability. But also the erasure. Often the emptiness speaks louder. I wonder, instead, what did they mean to write? When they erase, it’s a new layer of spray paint on top. Sometimes there’s so much erasure it bleeds, the spray paint trickling down from the censored message. What’s the message now?
Diba TajAbadi is a creative researcher, writer, and gatherer based in Iran. She's working at the interstices of embodied research, writing, organizing, and publishing across her given (Northern Europe) and chosen geography. Her work is drawn to spontaneous projects and explores ideas of (post)nature, counterarchiving, mapping, migration, and subversive tactics.
