Graffiti as a peacebuilding tool

By Alice Noirot

This is it, back to Amsterdam, back to Science Park and back to walking without the protection of street dogs. I think that for most of my peers, arriving in Schiphol made our trip to Kosovo seem like a distant dream. It started like a fantasy and ended up like a hallucination. The memories of the first meeting with the Center for Social Group Development were still very vivid, yet seemed like ages ago. 

Keeping those memories in mind, Shree and I started sorting out the 200 pictures of graffiti we had gathered during the trip. Fortunately, or unfortunately for time commitment, not a lot of pictures were overlapping. We then moved on to translating the messages on the pictures. This was a crucial moment, as we would finally discover what were the words and messages we had photographed, and we would see if we had enough material for our project. Turns out we have more than enough material, which we then divided into different clusters. We could separate all of our pictures into nine different themes, namely social issues, politics, nationalism, patriarchy, international presence, peace, symbolic figures, space created for expression and others. 

Photo: One of the street dog on the street of our hostel, who accompanied us to the top of the street every evening.

It was surprising to me that so many graffiti were talking about basic human rights – food, shelter, freedom from discrimination – whereas I expected many graffiti to talk about the war, missing people or resentment towards people deemed responsible for the war. I also didn’t expect to see so many graffiti about domestic violence and patriarchy. When interviewed, a group of four middle-aged women in Pristina answered that the situation for women had improved after the war, but that a lot of progress still had to be made. 

Photo: Meaning "Freedom for Palestine" in Mitrovica

When Shree and I started to try and provide background information to certain graffiti and some degree of analysis, I quickly observed a number of questions that I hadn't taken into account in Kosovo. First, how do we know when certain graffiti were made? Some of them have dates and others reference certain events, but for the rest, we might be analyzing someone’s opinion which dates back a few years. Our representation of Kosovo’s society would therefore not be up to date. Second, graffiti by nature are someone’s opinion, and it is hard to know how many people share it. So graffiti, despite giving a platform for voicing people’s opinion, also become a platform which creates a skewed reality, where we only see the opinion of people who are expressive about it. Lastly, graffiti are more often drawn by youth, or middle-aged people. Graffiti are therefore not made by an accurate sample of Kosovo’s population. 

So I very soon wondered to what degree Shree and I could provide an accurate analysis of the meaning of the graffiti, if so many factors were unclear. But Shree and I came to the conclusion that our analysis of graffiti was not aimed at creating an exact representation of what were the concerns of Kosovo’s population, but rather a depiction of certain concerns that were predominant in the city. Since we were able to separate our photos in different themes, it means that a certain number of people share this view in Kosovo, and that it is a current issue in Kosovo. Graffiti are therefore a tool for peacebuilding because they allow everyone to voice their opinions, while also providing an agenda of current concerns of some citizens of Kosovo.

Photo: Meaning "Oliver Criminal" in Pristina, more information in our booklet

With that in mind, we continued working on our project and are now very happy with the final result. This project gave us a great excuse to walk around the city without having a destination, and to talk with local people. Now, I also have a great excuse to go back to Kosovo, since it will be Shree’s next country of residence:)