Leaving Traces: The TAG Conference in Hamburg

15 July 2023

Photo: TAG Conference

At this year’s edition of the TAG conference, 20 speakers from 14 countries from five continents gathered in Hamburg to discuss a cultural phenomenon whose significance scholars have only just started to appreciate.

Tagging – leaving one’s name in public spaces, usually with a spray can – has long since ceased to be dismissed as a dubious pastime for teenagers. Today, the phenomenon is attracting increasing academic interest. The TAG conference is the most important international conference on this topic and brings researchers together with ‘writers’ from the scene every year. After editions in Berlin, Amsterdam, Cologne, and Modena, the conference came to Hamburg this year in cooperation with UWA as part of the exhibition ‘EINE STADT WIRD BUNT’ (‘A City Becomes Colourful’).

The kick-off took place on 29 June in the atrium of the Hamburg State and University Library (SUB). A film screening (‘Hobo Carvings in Red Bluff, CA’) was followed by lectures by graffiti experts Matthew Champion, Susan Philips, and main organiser Javier Abarca, who has been running the TAG since its inauguration. Together with his colleague Orestis Pangalos and Ondřej Škrabal, who is the head of the research field on ‘Situating Graffiti’ at CSMC, he also led the scientific committee in charge of putting together the programme of the conference.   

The presentations on 30 June and 1 July took place at the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (Museum for Hamburg History). They included, among many others, a talk by the Italian art historian Egidio Emiliano Bianco, who presented the work of the archaeological pioneer Antonio Bosio, who examined the inscriptions in Roman catacombs as early as the 16th century – and left some there himself. The Hamburg cultural scientist Kathleen Göttsche focussed on the phenomenon of ‘OZ’, who went from being an outsider artist to a kind of local hero in Hamburg. Sanja Ewald, who has been pursuing a PhD project on the work of Hamburg graffiti artist Mirko Reisser at CSMC, delivered a talk on the significance of the ‘black book’ in which graffiti writers draw their early sketches.

A compendium of the conference, providing a comprehensive account of its topics and themes, will soon be available. We are looking forward to the next edition of the TAG, the venue of which is yet to be confirmed.