This article explores how French street artist Mathieu Tremblin’s Tag Clouds satirises mainstream French media’s and right-wing politicians’ representations of the French banlieue. As Tag Clouds erases tags and writes over them in a more legible font, I argue that it performs visual sanitisation to satirise the politics and aesthetics of French visual culture affecting urban settings and banlieues. Politicians’ and media’s amalgamation of banlieue with immigration, violence and poverty extends to banlieue visual culture. Tag Clouds’ erasure of tags, I argue, challenges how French visual culture relies on an ‘economy of sameness’ (Brown, 2006) and the formatting of different cultural, racial and political identities into a unique, transparent model of citizenship. Tag Clouds reveals how sameness affects banlieue environments and visual culture. Ultimately, I demonstrate how Tag Clouds ironically calls for recognising the taggers’ ‘right to opacity’ (Glissant, 1990) and their right to refuse to conform to mainstream French visual culture norms.

中文翻译：

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写在墙上：马修·特伦布林（Mathieu Tremblin）的“标签云”和文化同化政治

本文探讨了法国街头艺术家马修·特兰布林（Mathieu Tremblin）的“标签云”如何使主流法国媒体和右翼政客对法国banlieue的表现产生讽刺。当标签云擦除标签并以更清晰的字体覆盖标签时，我认为它可以执行视觉卫生处理，以满足影响城市环境和城市环境的法国视觉文化的政治和审美观。政客和媒体将移民，暴力和贫困与banlieue融合在一起，扩展到banlieue视觉文化。我认为，标签云的标签擦除挑战了法国视觉文化如何依靠“同一性经济”（布朗，2006年）以及将不同的文化，种族和政治身份格式化为独特，透明的公民身份的方式。标签云揭示了相同性如何影响宴会环境和视觉文化。