Following Odysseus Not the end of the world Amarna city of light ...

69by handprint graffiti artists (7).The handprinters, who have beenactive for at least four years, seemto target mainly business premises.Rather surprisingly, the city authoritieshave made no attempt toremove these or other graffiti suchas the (anti) ‘Putin’ stencil that isprominent on a wall on one of theside streets (8).Away from the main hub of theold town, handprints and otherforms of tagging are absent, exceptfor three that have been painted onthe walls of a medieval apartmentbuilding (9) and a granite bollard(10) along a pedestrian walkwayknown as the Via San Salvatore,within a residential area south ofthe commercial centre and theBasilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.As with the hand-stencils thatadorn many caves throughout theearly prehistoric world, the distributionof painted handprints inBergamo’s Città Alta appears to bedeliberate and strategic. It is not76. to 10. Handprintsand graffiti inBergamo:6. On commercialpremises along theVia Bartolomeo inthe city centre.7. A single handprintwith the sloganPalestina Libera(Free Palestine).8. Blue stencilled faceof Putin with his namewritten alongside.9. A series of redhandprints on thewall of a medievalapartment buildingaway from Bergamo’scommercial hub.10. Handprint on agranite bollard on apedestrian walkway.11. The Red Handof Ulster, a Loyalistsymbol, alongside theUnion Flag, paintedon a wall just off theShankill Road in WestBelfast in 1983.10coincidental that the artist has targetedthe two streets that form thecommercial hub of the Old Town,and it is more than likely that thesevery visual statements are making apolitical point.Recent blogging activity on theinternet suggests that Bergamo’shandprints represent Red Hands –Red Heart, an extreme left-wingsymbol that may hark back to thedays of the extreme ideology of theRed Brigades, a radical group activeduring a rather dark period in Italy’srecent history. Alternatively, redhandprints could represent aromantic gesture, say between theartist and his or her lover. The strategiclocation of the prints, though,suggests some form of protestagainst capitalism, commercialisationand commerce.The majority of the handprintsand sprayed stencils are righthandedand, unlike their prehistoriccounterparts, all are anatomicallycorrect (all have four fingers and athumb). Based on the finger alignment,all are male (and were probablyexecuted by a male artist).Many appear to have been painted/sprayed in haste; paint dripping ispresent on many handprints andlimited contact between the stenciland the surface of the wall hasresulted in webbing around thelower section of many hands.Elsewhere, tagging has been usedas a territorial marker by both passivetaggers and rival gangs.In Northern Ireland during thebloody civil insurrection of theTroubles, the Red Hand of Ulsterwas used to identify certain areas ofBelfast as belonging to Loyalists(11). Ironically, this symbol wasoriginally a heraldic emblem usedby the Uí Néill clan during the NineYears War (1594-1603) against theEnglish; the war-cry in Gaelic wasLámh Dhearg Abú! (‘Red Handto Victory’).In both archaeological and contemporarygraffiti contexts, singleand multiple hand-stencils representthe epitome of signature and identity.From the prehistoric record, allsections of the family unit are represented,while in the graffiti worldthe hand-stencil represents theideology of the individual and his orher peer group.Although both groups aremoving around their respectivelandscapes, both also establish adegree of permanency throughboundaries held by the mark of thehand, and the hand stencils ofBergamo and Belfast are no exceptionto this rule. n8 1100Minerva November/December 2012