Expanding Lines: Negotiating Space, Body, and Language Limits in Train Graffiti Elisa Bordin University of Padua "Exclusion should not be defined only in relation to income, work, or civil rights, as it is mainly found in sociological literature; its basic aspect would rather be the exclusion from communication. The diverse social mutilations acquire exemplary and general significance only as long as they entail the loss of the concrete possibility of taking part into communication." --"exclusion/inclusion," Massimo De Carolis. Post-Fordist Lexicon, 109 [1] [1] This work aims to analyze train (railroad) graffiti as a performance, understood as a threefold process that involves the circulation of the train, the writer's body, and the visual language on the train. The first two features, that is, the circulation of the train in the city and the atypical use of the graffiti writers' bodies, undermine the construction of what is considered public space, thus collapsing the normalizing effect of contemporary cities as spaces of control (Foucault 1967:2). Train graffiti proposes a different dialogue with the ordering forces of society, as it acts on what is public space in illegal ways and by appropriating language. The analysis of the writer's body movement brings to the fore a further reasoning on the graffiti practice as a performance, which as such dismantles not only the idea of public space, but also the use of written words, understood once again in Michel Foucault's notion of language as a coercive means that is involved in the creation of public and controlled dimensions. The bodily performance of the graffiti writers, together with the type of written letters they use, and the redefinition of what is to be thought of as common space, concur to establish a post-modern practice, which questions how we create and understand meaning in our urban realities. In particular, the beginning of this practice in the 1970s, in New York, links the disruptive force of graffiti to other American movements of those years (think of Chicano literature and the use and recovery of Ebonics), which questioned the existence of a controlled language employed to legitimize a controlled social, spatial, and linguistic arena. [2] Generally, graffiti refers to spray-made productions encompassing images and writings on more or less public, moving or still, supports. The term "graffiti," therefore, spans a number of different artistic practices, such as street, stencil, and aerosol art. These practices are usually combined under the wide umbrella term "street art," since they share analogous aesthetics and a similar medium (the spray can) through which a work of art is accomplished. However, the interchangeable use of the terms "graffiti" and "street art" is here avoided. For the interest of this study, I will focus only on those productions that arrange the writing of the producer's name on the external wall of a train car, as I suggest that the pictorial support on which train graffiti is done is a leading cue to understand its performative and transitory character. Among the different artistic graffiti practices, train graffiti is by and large not in contradiction with similar aesthetics; nevertheless, this mode stands out for the mobile nature of its pictorial support, a fact that contributes to the understanding of the practice as a performance. In contrast to graffiti produced on canvas and/or packageable bases, and as a consequence of the fact that train graffiti writing is made on a public and moving support, this pictorial practice cannot be easily reproduced and sold. This has a consequence on its disruptive force in comparison to other forms of graffiti that, over the years, have approached art or commercial market. [2] [3] Train graffiti writing gained momentum in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, as part of the broader hip-hop movement.[3] Even though some place the first appearance of urban graffiti in Philadelphia, where tags by Cornbread and Cool Ear appeared in 1968-1969 (Piquer), New York is perceived as the symbolic city in the iconography of the movement. [4] In fact, it is in New York that graffiti has developed its styles and then spread, first in the city's districts in the 1980s, and then, by achieving global dimension in the 1990s. [5] Paradoxically, while graffiti was gaining