Harm’s Way
Performance
2022
A pertinent catalyst for self-mythologizing has been my encounter with the ‘NGR/NGRS/NGRZ’ series of graffiti, which have been widespread across Tallinn for some time. In the summer of 2022, passerby’s stares and comments began to hamper my comfort in public. My state of mind during this period drove me closer to interaction with these graffiti as I crossed paths with them every day.
Over time, the NGR tags became another wall of my enclosure in Tallinn. I began to become broken down by dehumanizing public sight lines, discourses, and then graffiti. I became confused about whether walls could speak or not, and whether or not I could converse with a wall’s language. In which kind of environment could someone like myself, inhabiting so many overlapping, marginalized identity categories, speak? How could speaking help me constitute myself here? This question of speakability drove me towards performance.
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The NGR series of graffiti affected me in such a way that it revealed a hidden logic. I could not comprehend being disembodied by a text on a wall. It seemed that the simple arrangement of three or four iconic letters on the paths I took could be the source of so much of what had been left unspoken from my experience [in Tallinn]. The simple appearance of these graffiti seemed to confirm the negation of my experience to others as it confirmed the truth of my experience to myself.
The speakers became clear to me just as I became the object of their speech.