Project description

This is a continuously growing graffiti archive that aims to document urbex buildings together with the graffiti found within them. The archive is open for anyone to edit and is freely accessible and usable.

Industrial buildings and the graffiti they contain can be understood as material traces of an urban culture shaped by the historical forces of the Industrial Revolution and the development of capitalism. These sites once functioned as infrastructures of production, labor, and economic expansion; however, once abandoned, they gradually transform into spaces open to reinterpretation and informal cultural practices. Within these emptied industrial environments, graffiti emerges as a visual layer of contemporary urban expression, inscribing new meanings onto structures originally designed for entirely different purposes.

Documenting and collecting these graffiti inscriptions within former industrial buildings may be understood as a form of cultural preservation. In this sense, the gesture of collecting graffiti can be conceptually paralleled with the tradition of folk song collection. Just as ethnographic projects once sought to record disappearing forms of rural cultural expression, the systematic documentation of graffiti captures ephemeral manifestations of urban culture that often remain outside institutional archives. The key difference lies in the perspective of observation: while folk song collection focused primarily on rural traditions, this approach turns its attention toward the city as a cultural field, examining the visual and spatial practices that emerge within post-industrial urban landscapes.

Through this lens, the archive becomes more than a repository of images; it functions as a framework for understanding how contemporary urban culture occupies and reinterprets the architectural remnants of industrial modernity. The graffiti embedded within these structures thus operates as a form of cultural sediment, revealing alternative narratives of the city that coexist alongside official histories of architecture, industry, and economic development.