Sabrina Was Here!

Sticking your name into the sidewalk (pun absolutely intended) is something that everyone's probably familiar with, whether it be by having the good fortune to find a freshly-lain slab of cement to doodle your name onto or by seeing a name etched every few steps on your way to the nearest bus stop.

Writing your name all over a desk in middle school is also something that everyone's probably familiar with, whether it be the students that practice their bubble letters in permanent ink on tables or the teachers that scrub at the names with clorox wipes in futile attempts to get them off.

But what about writing your name on a brick? On a wall? On a chair? On a pipe? In a friend's dusty old calculator? Is there a limit to the amount of places where we feel we can scribble our identities all over?

Many call this endless name-writing tradition tagging, borrowed from graffiti culture. However, while tagging within graffiti art definitely falls into this '______ was here' category, writing your name in a calculator probably won't count as graffiti art. So then there's this gray area where no one knows what to call this thing that everyone does for seemingly no justifiable reason, and no one knows how to address it.

Well, name-tagging/name-writing/name whatever you want to call it seems to start very young, from when you're first taught to write your name at the top of your homework assignments to signify possession, identification. Then two days later you're writing your name on the walls in crayon at home and get scolded. Pretty soon you're writing your name in the sand, then it's in a bathroom stall, then it's on a friend's dorm room desk table. One could think of this as leaving a breadcrumb trail of all the places you've been to in your life, but it's almost never that conscious or purposeful (and when it is purposeful, it is usually for a specific task like graffiti or geotagging).

I like to think of this convention as a way that we leave traces of ourselves in the past, noting our presence at a particular place and at a particular time. There's also this prevalent idea in culture that emphasizes the importance of being remembered by others once one has passed on. Marking your name on a slab of sidewalk or on a classroom table isn't going to get you remembered, but your name will be read and recognized, lasting for however long that medium is around. Leaving these mementos of being--all by identifying your name—allows for your legacy (however small) to spread wherever those tagged items go and for however long they last.