Penger, Severin
PhD Candidate
Research Project: “Traces of a City: Tattoos in Naples”
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Free University Berlin (Germany)

In this presentation I examine the mediating (and co-constituting) role of an ‘urban skin’ (see
also Diaconu 2011) of Naples, Italy. As such, it operates between lived experience and ideas of
a larger social framework, by being embodied in a social form of value.

The creation and reproduction of the self, the society, and the state are impossible without the
mediation through images and other material, affective media. Therefore, mediation can both
maintain or undermine hegemonic power-relations, and political actors on different levels –
from state officials to tattoo and graffiti artists – are concerned with (re-)presenting the ‘right
image’, or changing the ‘wrong’ one. With reference to Graeber’s (2001) ‘theory of value,’ and
drawing on 22 months of fieldwork in Naples, Italy, I understand the ‘urban skin’ as a relational
medium of value, which is simultaneously symbolic and material, social and subjective. I argue
that Naples’ urban skin consists of interdependent interfaces such as tattoos, graffiti, or digital
imagery, constituting a nexus between changing subjective desires and societal meanings. Its
aesthetics make abstract statal politics visible and palpable, giving rise to competing, local or
transnational visions of how society, or the city, and its respective selves may or should look
like.

The manipulation of the Naples’ walls can be traced back to close-by antique Pompeii and is
still found everywhere. The practice ranges from local, rivalling groups and their symbols, to
personal expressions of emotional belonging, or commercial advertisement. But the state also
intervenes, e.g., when police paints over memorial graffiti, or when the community of Naples
is represented during cultural events through valuable street art. Social media take an active
part in this process, having a democratizing, controlling, or manipulative impact on valuecirculation. Finally, tattooing, the most intimate bodily practice, is likewise related to longstanding political struggles over value, in that it was documented by criminologists and the police since the late 19 th century with the intent to eradicate the practice. Today, these formerly stigmatized bodily aesthetics still serve to identify and control certain individuals, but are recognized in their economic potential, too. This leads to a different statal way of controlling and capitalizing on the practice of tattooing, enabling also a more liberal stand towards it. What has changed only little, though, is a strong objection of the nation-state (related to a revalorisation of the city) on behalf of the tattooed, mediated through painfully embodied images, sometimes resonating with the mural or digital interfaces. Therefore, I seek to investigate the specific materiality of different ‘urban skins’ and their intentional, but never-perfect manipulation, as well as their importance in creating and transforming ‘imaginal’ (Bottici 2022) wholes, in order to understand both the changes and the continuities in Naples’ differently valued ‘urban skins.’