De la territorialisation à la globalisation: La pratique du tag en mouvement

Abstract

The image we have of tags seems never to have been updated since they first appeared on the streets of New York. However, the practice behind these tags, which dates at least 50 years, has crossed territorial borders and exceeded temporal expectations. Its omnipresence in our day-to-day does not fail to remind us of its power. In fact, the followers have multiplied and proliferated beyond the megacities where their presence is trivialized. The objective of this article is to define the connections between this last assertion and the evolution of the social-spatial structure of taggers. Based on interviews and accounts from participant observation over two years (from 2018 to 2020) within a group of taggers in Paris and elsewhere in metropolitan France, two forms of relationships emerge: the relationship between taggers and the territory, and the relationship between the territory and the phenomena of globalization. The results obtained support the idea that globalized regional mutations reconfigure the social space of taggers. Accordingly, by admitting that taggers remained confined within their original structure, in which an “imagined community” is forged, an updated form of community is revealed.