This workshop brings together literary scholars, historians, and cultural theorists to explore graffiti and mural inscriptions as ego-documents that illuminate lived experience in contexts of coercion, resistance, and urban transformation. Across case studies ranging from prisoner graffiti in Nazi concentration camps and Gestapo prisons to farewell letters of resistance fighters, street poetry in contemporary European cities, “littératures sauvages,” and military inscriptions in the Namur fortifications, the speakers examine how writing on walls becomes a medium of testimony, identity, dissent, and socio-political awareness. The aim of the workshop is to develop a comparative and interdisciplinary framework for understanding these fragile and often overlooked textual traces – integrating material, linguistic, literary, historical, and geo-spatial perspectives – in order to grasp how such inscriptions function both as records of individual voices and as cultural artefacts that shape, contest, and memorialize public and carceral space.
Here is an overview of the programme of the day. For any questions, don't hesitate to contact Prof. Dr. Arvi Sepp (arvi.sepp@vub.be) or Prof. Dr. Nel de Mûelenaere (Nel.De.Muelenaere@vub.be).
