Cited as an elusive metropolis, the city of Johannesburg largely resists the imagination. Following on from Lucy Gasser’s (2014) reading of Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys this article considers how graffiti and street art offer ways of “mapping” the city. Focusing on Nuttall and Mbembe’s distinction between surface and depth I argue, through a particular focus on the Westdene Graffiti Project, how street art captures some of the tensions in current South Africa and provides new ways of understanding Johannesburg by meeting a map’s six key functions: getting to know, re-forming boundaries, making exist, reproducing reality, inscribing meaning and establishing patterns of control. The result is a city written from below.

中文翻译：

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从下方书写城市：约翰内斯堡的涂鸦

作为一个难以捉摸的大都市，约翰内斯堡市在很大程度上抵制了想象。继 Lucy Gasser (2014) 阅读 Ivan Vladislavić 的肖像与钥匙之后，本文探讨了涂鸦和街头艺术如何提供“映射”城市的方式。关注 Nuttall 和 Mbembe 在表面和深度之间的区别，我认为，通过对 Westdene 涂鸦项目的特别关注，街头艺术如何捕捉当前南非的一些紧张局势，并通过满足地图的六个关键功能来提供理解约翰内斯堡的新方法：了解、重新形成边界、使存在、再现现实、铭记意义和建立控制模式。结果是一个从下面写的城市。