Archives

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  Graffiti, heritage and context: the act and significance of writing

  Vol. 1 No. 1 (2025)

  Inspired by the panel “Graffiti, heritage and context: the act and significance of writing” presented at the Urban Creativity Conference, this issue brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on graffiti as a situated practice of mark-making across time, cultures, and material contexts. Moving beyond graffiti as mere inscription or visual artifact, the contributions explore writing as an embodied, relational, and meaning-producing act—one that negotiates memory, identity, power, and presence in public and sacred spaces.

  Spanning case studies from ancient sanctuaries and rock art sites to modern urban walls and politically charged environments, the issue examines how acts of writing mediate between the personal and the collective, the ephemeral and the permanent, the illicit and the institutional. Through lenses such as epigraphy, semiotics, phenomenology, heritage studies, and contemporary graffiti practice, the articles collectively foreground writing as an action that shapes space, asserts belonging, and inscribes continuity across generations.

  Together, these contributions position graffiti not as marginal or ancillary, but as a fundamental cultural practice through which societies articulate meaning, negotiate authority, and leave traces of lived experience in the material world.

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  Common Grounds: Graffiti, Identity, and the Production of Urban Space

  Vol. 1 No. 2 (2025)

  This second issue of EGI – Epigraphy, Graffiti, Iconography is published under the title Common Grounds: Graffiti, Identity, and the Production of Urban Space, and continues the journal’s commitment to exploring writing beyond its formal, institutionalized boundaries. Bringing together historical, linguistic, visual, and spatial perspectives, the issue investigates how unofficial inscriptions—ancient and contemporary—function as modes of expression, documentation, and negotiation of meaning within shared environments.

  At its core, this issue seeks to establish common analytical ground between epigraphy and graffiti studies, treating informal writing not as marginal residue but as a central component of script culture. From carved inscriptions to sprayed walls, from linguistic variation to visual intervention, the contributions highlight writing as an embodied, contextual, and socially embedded practice.