Braille Style - Graffiti für Blinde

Alexis Dworsky
„Braille Style – Graffiti für Blinde“

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The artist Alexis Dworsky translates existing graffiti into Braille, an alphabet that can be read by blind people. This artistic project, which has been going on for years, was sparked by a remarkable experience. Dworsky was walking through the city with a blind person. When he started talking about a large piece of graffiti on a wall, his companion answered: “Graffiti, what’s that?” Dworsky then developed this artistic concept that he is still pursuing today: making it possible for visually impaired people to also read graffiti. The motivation behind this project was to enable blind people to participate more intensively in the public space. The initial situation is clear: Graffiti fundamentally shapes the urban scene, but this visual impression is inaccessible to people with severely impaired vision. In keeping with the ideal of a more inclusive society, these so-called “writings,” “tags,” “throw-ups,” etc. also need to be perceptible to everyone. Dworsky has embraced this goal and now translates graffiti into Braille.

Inclusion means that everyone is involved or at least given access—regardless of their physical state and characteristics. Visually impaired people’s ability to take part in public life very substantially depends on the existence of tactile wayfinding systems, such as handrail systems, surface indicators or audio signals at traffic lights, elevators, etc. The signals in public spaces that are readable for blind people rarely extend beyond mere aids to orientation. Dworsky wants to also translate subversive subcultural signals for them. Critics of graffiti will likely assert it is probably an advantage to not have to see these scribblings in the public space. However, Dworsky is not interested in this pointless debate. Nonetheless, this potential objection brings us to the question of what inclusion and participation in the public space actually mean?

Alexis Dworsky – „Braille Style – Graffiti für Blinde“ (Grafiti for blind people) und „Urbanit – Sedimentgestein aus Lackschichten“ (sedimentary rocks from paint layers) (2020/21) | Video: YES, AND… productions GmbH & Co. KG

The people who create graffiti are ultimately also asserting a right to take part in shaping the image of the city. Many of them inscribe themselves into the cityscape in order to establish a counterweight to commercial advertising. Others are dissatisfied with acts of official city planning. Most add their symbols to communicate among themselves or share something with the public. The aim is often to achieve greater visibility for their own cause. In this respect, the urban space proves to be a controversial one. But how can the inclusion of the blind be realized in this space? In recent years, Dworsky has solved this self-imposed task predominantly by translating written characters from tags and throw-ups. In the form of hemispheres made of Styrofoam, he glued the Braille letters directly onto the graffiti. During his Fresh A.I.R. residency, he teamed up with a sprayer to develop a graffiti whose motif works without written script, but instead integrates a term in Braille. On display (for those who can see) is a structure reminiscent of a rod or a construction made of iron bars. Orange hemispheres made of Styrofoam are attached where the rods seem to be connected in joints. Translated as Braille characters, they form the word “fusion” which is thus the description of what sighted people can or at least should see.

But is the chance to be able to read and touch a graffiti in itself already participation? Or, to put it differently: What would those who are perhaps unable to see, but are instead able to hear very well, or whose tactile sense is particularly well developed—what would they share with or translate for those who do not have these urban impressions? Setting out from this question, maybe it would be possible to talk about the realization of inclusion in the city and the subculture in yet another way.

The surface feel of graffiti also preoccupies Dworsky in another work: Urbanit – Sedimentary rocks from paint layers. What at first glance looks like polished gems turn out to be fragments of walls on which several graffiti have been placed on top of each other. Chunks keep breaking off from the much-used ‘Halls of Fame’ (surfaces on which it is legal to spray), in which the different layers of paint are recognizable. Like an urban sediment, the subcultural buzz is deposited here, so to speak. The pieces collected, worked and polished by the artists can be touched, feeling pleasant in the hand. One could also imagine them in a museum of urban history. In their almost kitschy aesthetic, they probably say as much or as little about graffiti culture as the boulders in museum collections that are supposed to tell of prehistoric times.

Text: Kea Wienand



About Alexis Dworsky

Alexis Dworsky, born in Freising, Germany, is a conceptual artist. He has (re)constructed a dinosaur from a roast hare and wrote a doctoral thesis on it. In Google Street View, he drives around the world and gives travel lectures about it. He staged a fitness trail in the middle of the city and translates graffiti for the blind.

For more information: Website I Facebook I Instagram


Fresh A.I.R. #4 Online-Showcase

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The Online-Showcase offers an opportunity to get an overview of the highly diverse projects of the fourth class of Fresh A.I.R. artists with their different kinds of media and aesthetics.

On view are video and photographic materials about the individual projects, each of which is accompanied by an explanatory text that aims to offer insights into the work’s aesthetic experience.

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