ABSTRACT
VoS is a nonprofit organization that I had founded in Stockholm two years earlier. Through the collective production of murals in public spaces, the organization engages in community-building efforts in order to nuance the prevalent image of stigmatized suburbs and their residents. By visualizing residents’ own stories of their suburb in major outdoor walls, VoS aims to counter what Loïc Wacquant (2007) calls territorial stigmatization. The production of large murals in public spaces becomes the means to, one, organize residents in marginalized and vulnerable areas, and two, resist the dominant and derogatory image of the neighborhood. The public wall is turned into a space on which residents can cast their coordinated/collective voice, a platform from which to re-tell their neighborhood from their own experiences of it. In this way, art and community are, indeed, quintessential to VoS’s work.
