Retrieving the Rhythm of the July Uprising is a talk based on the visual interventions of the student-people movement that finally unseated a fifteen-year-long civil dictatorship. During the movement, posters, placards, slogans, and other forms of agitprop were in circulation. What followed the fall of the dictator was also unprecedented – groups of people, mostly consisting of students, took to the streets with brushes and paint in their hands with the intention of giving shape to their aspirations. And, the result was graffiti where words and images converged. The walls of cities across Bangladesh were thus decked in new forms of wall paintings.
These images, slogans, and sayings that accompanied them were more than what meets the eye. They not only carried the revolutionary zeal but also drew on the democratic aspiration of the millions. If any monuments are to be built on the July movement, one must negotiate what proliferated in the forms of posters and pamphlets on social media during the movement and the wall paintings that defied norms, only to make way for the masses to display their artistic acumen. Graffiti or wall paintings, whichever way we frame them, are the true expression of the uprising, still occupying public space like a counter memorial.