Graffiti e pratiche di ri-scrittura murale. La East Side Gallery di Berlino

Walls can be strategically or tactically used. In the first case, they symbolise social and political power as well as the intention to divide people, isolate communities, draw boundaries and borders and preclude all contact and communication. In the second one, through art, the barriers can communicate and express the voices of those that the social power would like to divide and make silent. So if, on the one hand, we assist to normalisation processes that try to incorporate the artificial barriers to the surrounding context so that, over time, we tend not to be aware of their presence, on the other hand, graffiti try to break the “grey” silence of walls, giving back to them that visibility that normalisation tries to hide. But how can graffiti break the silent isolation of walls, turning them into means of communication? How do they “pull down” barriers? Through the semiotic analysis of some of the most relevant examples of mural art at the East Side Gallery (BerlinWall) this paper aims at dealing with this matter, coming to define graffiti as “re–writing practices”: mural writing, using walls as inscription surfaces, allows to “re–semantise” artificial barriers, that is to “re–write” their meanings and functions, acting on semantic oppositions such as “lack of communication” vs “dialogue”, “isolation” vs “communication”, “euphoria” vs “dysphoria”, “life” vs “death”, “continuity” vs “discontinuity”, ecc.