Semiosi e colonialità in Palestina Riflessioni decoloniali sulla guerrilla visuale contro il muro israeliano

Abstract

The present essay looks at the Palestinian question within the field of
artistic activism (artivism), which, through a myriad of graffiti (among
which Banksy’s, Joy van Erven’s and Blu’s), offers a sort of counter-semiosis within the
coloniality of power (Quijano), in the attempt to symbolically knock down the Israeli
wall. This wall-border becomes a herida abierta that bleeds, in the words of Gloria
Anzaldúa, the global south’s blood, forced to clash against the global north’s
walls, Israel being the product of the latter (Said, Question). This wall-border becomes
“global” to the extent that the defence barrier, as it is called by the Israeli, or apartheid
wall, as called by the Palestinians, has become a sort of global canvas on which a
transnational visual guerrilla is fought. This fight is here interpreted through the lens
of decolonial thought and, to put it with Walter Benjamin, from the perspective of the
tradition of the oppressed.