Alter Ego, 2020.
In the origin of Berkeley’s Free Speech movement were the ordinary students who resisted current public policies and fought for their rights as a student community. The narratives created by students in a female-bodied bathroom spaces serves as a unique stage to freely express the hidden desires and concerns. This scattered tagging are fragmental, sometimes violently erased by other readers. Yet, they create a platform for an intimate and anonymous discourses around different subjects. The recontextualization of bathroom tags is a new platform will make them visible for a broader public. The dislocation of tagging from their initial gendered locus of female restrooms, transforms them into specific art objects, creating a new form of viewership and offering those tags as fragments of social histories. The purpose of rearticulating tagging in an urban setting aims to give a voice to these very individuals, even if anonymously. This genuine interaction and anonymous participatory engagement of various individuals create a unique educational platform, encouraging public activism and allowing them to come up with political statements, and raise different social issues otherwise neglected. The documentation and publication of those images and texts will shed light on different types of segregations or communal interactions.
Ninel Melkonyan
B.A., History of Art 2021
Shua Jo
Sam Li