Politicizing publics: a social framework for public artworks

This chapter illustrates the generative cultural practices of street murals in Belfast, in illuminating the dangers of normative conceptualizations of space and community as fixed and closed. It suggests a rethinking of community through the practices of street art, as murals such as the depiction of an Irish myth in an alleyway in Ballymurphy illustrate the ways in which discussions are taking place within communities, and between communities and those outside them. In Belfast, mural painting has its roots in the representations of working-class identities at a time when the city was a shipyard of global importance in the early twentieth century. Like the mural painting on the separation walls of the West Bank in Palestine, mural painting in Belfast intersects with the cultural and political landscape and the divisions within it; here, the cultural divisions between nationalism and unionism.