Making Marks, Inscribing Solidarity

As much as we view cities through their buildings, we can also see them as complex living systems within ethical and political contexts which gather and project meaning. The city is the physical platform for collective human existence, an inclusive idea that involves the diversity of people inhabiting and producing shared space. Cities are the site of human action, public memory and imagination. Perhaps coalescing all of this, they are the place where our stories are shared publicly as relations between strangers in urban space.

Cities tell stories in peculiar ways. They gather and project meaning by narrating acts of presence. The public urban space of the city is constantly made and remade by our interactions and interrelations¹. Public space uniquely crowds out all other alternative visions and underlying stories to simply present what is there as something that is self-evident: it is uniquely ‘in your face’, and yet, in a way, also ‘mute’. Put a brick or a stone in a city street, and you have to negotiate that stone; it is simply there. Anything else that may be there — a tree, a person, an animal or an ecology — is not there by virtue of the stone being there. The stone takes all your attention and your consciousness. The stone is a mark made in public urban space. We read it and navigate it through our shared encounter with it.

The city has always been a site of mark-making, and in the last nine months, the most significant mark-making has been in the production of solidarity with Palestine. It is the spatial politics of these acts that calls for further attention.

Textual Mark Making

I see it written on walls in Tarntanya, on a tram stop in Naarm, on a bathroom window in Berlin and the docks of the Seine in Paris. The appearance of the phrase varies — scrawled, stencilled, stickered — as does it scale and siting. We see it writ large on walls and pavements, and read it small on doors, on benches, on street posts. Despite its multifaceted appearances and spatial appropriations, its call is consistent — Free Palestine. 

‘Free Palestine’ marks the city at the scale of the city. It is so omnipresent that it is no longer a semantic phrase but a symbol in its own right. It appropriates our shared urban fabric, going beyond simply expressing a political demand to instead make a demand on the public: a call for solidarity and awareness made through the appropriation of urban space. 

Appropriation of urban space is a powerful tactic and expression of the ‘right to the city’². Mark making such as graffiti can be understood as a form of spatial appropriation. It is a quotidian practice: a tactic used by those who do not participate in the control or definition of urban spaces, but nevertheless find ways of making claims to it, employing what has been termed the “arts of the weak”. Together, these ‘weak’ acts can form a strong and shared voice³. ‘Free Palestine’ marks city walls, repeating itself over and over at the scale of the city — small symbols of solidarity appropriating public space to share a large voice. 

Similar inscriptions of mark-making in the urban fabric are well documented, the most well-known in so-called ‘australia’ being Arthur Stacey’s ‘Eternity’, which was written on footpaths on Gadigal land for 35 years. Each day at 5am, Arthur would leave his wife, Pearl and their home in Pyrmont to walk the streets of Gadigal land, chalking the word Eternity on footpaths, train station entrances and anywhere else. It is estimated he wrote the word 500,000 times between 1930 to 1956. Workers arriving in the city would see the word freshly written, but never the writer. Stacey’s ‘Eternity’ was canonised during the Sydney 2000 Olympic Opening Ceremony and on the Harbour Bridge for the New Year celebrations of 2000. 

Bodily Mark Making

I hear it before I see it. The sound ricochets across the tall stone facades of the city. After following this shared voice, I find its source — thousands of bodies gathered outside Naarm’s City Library chanting ‘Free, free Palestine!’ 

Naarm was famously established as Melbourne with no public civic square to assemble in, a legacy of its colonial founding which feared public political assembly. Many ‘australian’ cities lack the traditional public square outside a parliamentary building, and yet, protests have occupied their public spaces, coalescing weekly to physically mark the urban fabric in the call for a free Palestine. They have also occupied our university campuses. 

Across varied beginnings in April, ‘australian’ universities saw ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampments’ occupy their campuses. In an open letter published by Overland⁴, the encampments called on universities “to disclose all of their ties with Israel, divest from those ties, and sign on to the international Boycott Divestment & Sanctions statement.” The image of makeshift camps occupying our university campuses harkens back to similar movements during the 60s and 70s and creates a powerful image. Grand Victorian Revival and neoclassical campus buildings have been foregrounded by makeshift tents, their colourful polyester contrasting the soft yellow sandstone. These informal architectures and their heterogenous assemblage of bodies have marked new rhythms and routines of campus life, destabilising the increasingly curated and event-managed university campus grounds. 

Education design attempts to make campus spaces ‘sticky’ to encourage students to stay and study on campus. This has led to many campuses reflecting much of the cosmopolitan life from the cities they reside. However, this has also led to campus spaces simply becoming more cosmopolitan. Libraries have ceded space for books to space for socialising. Study spaces look more like cafes, communal areas have become carnivalesque. 

The political encampments have also been sticky, but in a different way. They offer an alternative registration of higher education: horizontal, communal, and, of course, free. There is the sharing of food and shelter, and the teaching of alternative curriculums centred on social justice rather than industry engagement. They highlight the University as an arena of struggle between the different interests that shape our campuses, and they mark these different interests by their occupation.

Ecological Mark Making

On May 23, an olive tree appeared on The University of Adelaide North Terrace Campus. It was one of many planted across ‘australia’ by the Gaza Solidarity Encampments. Planted in a small rectangular garden bed outside the Napier Building, the tree arrived alongside five small Palestinian flags and a metal plaque commemorating the date of its planting by those occupying the campus. A few days later, the plaque and flags were gone. A week later, the tree was gone. A week after that, so was the encampment. A few weeks after that, encampments throughout ‘australia’ were being disbanded or removed. At the time of writing, none remain.

When the poet Czeslaw Milosz was asked what he would do if the world was ending tomorrow, he said that he would plant apple trees.

The tree is a marker and a gesture. Encountering the tree on the curated campus grounds warrants surprise and delight, and curiosity — it’s not meant to be there. Much like Joseph Beuys’ land art piece ‘7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration’ where 7000 Oak trees were planted over five years throughout Kassel, Germany, the tree is a provocation. 

There is a story attributed to the late John Berger a mere three sentences in length (no record of him writing it exists, and yet, it does⁵). The story goes “A man walks along a stony beach. As he goes, he turns a single stone upright. He leaves it, standing there, on its end”. Like many of Berger’s stories, this story describes how meaning becomes expressed through presence. In deciding to turn the stone upright, the stone speaks. It becomes present.

In the urban space of a city, we must navigate the presence of the upturned stone. Mark making in our cities — whether the written ‘Free Palestine’, the occupation of university campus, or the planting of a tree — must likewise be navigated. In their public navigation, their meaning becomes expressed through their spatial politics. From literal and personal (handwriting) to uncontrolled and unmediated (bodies assembling in space) to gestural (the tree). 

In Here is Where we Meet, John Berger’s deceased mother says, “everything in life, is a question of drawing a line, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it”⁶.