The Calligraphy of Tagging

Theory and Practice Workshop

13–14 May 2024

Instructor: Javier Abarca

Nicolas Dolto

Gain access to the contemporary culture of tagging from an academic and calligraphic point of view. The workshop includes lectures, exercises on paper, and a hands-on tagging session using graffiti markers on a wall.

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What is tagging?

Contemporary urban tagging is, by far, the most prevalent and widely practiced form of calligraphy in known history. In spite of that, it remains largely ignored as such by the wider world of calligraphy including practitioners, aficionados and researchers.

Tagging is also the most complex and extensive calligraphic tradition. Its range of writing tools, materials, surfaces, scales, postures, and heavily-conditioning contexts expands well beyond any other. Its palette of styles encompasses all possible aesthetic approaches to the letterform.

The calligraphic tradition of tagging is a mass phenomenon, and its depth should therefore come as no surprise. The established tastes, methodologies and values of the culture have evolved and ramified in the hands of generations of practitioners over six decades in countless cities across the world.

Learning about tagging

Tagging is underground knowledge. Mastering its secrets traditionally involved working one’s way into the ‘prestige economy’ of the graffiti scene in order to access its mentor-apprentice structure. This largely diluted with the arrival of the Internet, and now anyone with time and curiosity can learn about it.

The workshop on ‘The Calligraphy of Tagging’ gives access to the culture of tagging from an academic and calligraphic point of view. Its program combines theory and practice through lectures, exercises on paper, and a hands-on tagging session using graffiti markers on a wall.

Students learn about different approaches to tagging in order to conceive a compelling alias and graphic identity, explore the most characteristic techniques of contemporary tagging, and – most importantly – get to understand and enjoy better the different signatures they see everyday.

Learning tagging opens the eyes to a whole new artistic landscape within the city, while providing with conceptual tools for a better understanding of the spaces, surfaces and inner workings of the urban environment.