Embodied walls and extended skins: exploring mental health through tataus and graffiti

Tattoo comes from “tatau,” a Samoan/Tahitian word for mark. Graffiti recorded on walls are also an inscription in a skin, a narrative in the flesh of the city (an extension of our-selves), and someone has extended a cut from their own flesh to this urban skin, a sort of dermatological testimony. Our organic skin creates an illusory belief that, that is where we end and the rest of the environment begins. Hence, removing graffiti from walls may be positioned as a palimpsest of dermabrasion, political censorship, and bodily restriction. In this chapter, New Materialisms, Contemporary Animism, and the New Science of the Mind/Situated Aesthetics help me to conceive mental health and well-being differently while investigating tataus and graffiti in the city of Liverpool. We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box. Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh? (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 138)