posted by Hatty

Depending on your background, your visualization of the word street can look like so many things. A pristine paved road of cement and asphalt lined with palm trees and manicured lawns where kids come out to play water slides during summer. A bustling marketplace with crowded makeshift stalls and tents and carts displaying everything edible under the sun and moms and pops count cash as tourists snap their iPhones and try the Lonely Planet phrases of ‘thank you’s. Perhaps you see failing lamp lights, sneakers hung over telephone pole lines, potholes and trash by the sidewalk plastered in gumdrops, and without exception a tag, or two, or three in spray paints on some corner where dudes hang smoking. If you are like me – from an immigrant family and somewhat privileged with college education as well as an incurable case of wanderlust – you probably have seen all of them, and then some.

The truth is that no matter where we come from, there is something about the space that speaks to all of us in ways that no other spaces do. A street is a public domain. What you do there, people can see. Nobody owns it, therefore everybody owns it. It’s not a special place you go once in awhile for a specific purpose, like let’s say, a museum. Accessible, inclusive, open: they are concepts with which artists in the business of consciousness-raising work engage their audience.

Street art as I understand it – and hopefully becoming accessible to the hundreds of visitors at the museum in the picture – is exactly that. It’s about survival, about transformation, about an individual and the communities around expressing some answers to their questions of belonging and place. Cesaretti’s street writers are one of the many contributors on the subject of space we will look into for the next issue of Peel Pages.