W
hat if we thought of writing not as a series of letters but a series of gestures? What if we saw it not as an act of mind, in which the brain sends signals to the hands, but as an act of the whole mind-body complex? What if we were to do our writing out in public, like Greek philosophers arguing in the agora or, to use the later Latin word, the forum?
These questions shed light on the close kinship between two forms of writing that you might think are so different they are almost opposites: calligraphy and graffiti. Alice Mazzilli puts this connection into practice through a visual art that combines writing, painting, music, and movement: jamigraphy, or jamming with calligraphy.
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To understand how radical this art form is, let’s go back to school — to the place where we were first taught what writing ought to be. In Alice’s case, this was in Grosseto, Italy, where schools taught a form of cursive based on the 19th-century French round hand that was used to standardize handwriting in both Italy and France.
“Very rounded letters, joined — I imagined them holding hands,” Alice says. “I tried to copy it, and my first instinct was to write really big, so it took the whole page. Only afterwards did I realize I had to scale it.”
In a sense, when we were taught to write, we were being taught how to behave. Be neat and tidy. Stay within the lines. Copy exactly what you are told.
“It had to be done a certain way,” Alice says. “I tried using different pens, which I liked, but I was never encouraged to write in different scripts or to experiment with letters. Every few months I would change my handwriting. I just loved exploring different shapes.”
It was that sense of exploration that caught her attention when she first began seeing graffiti. Like most graffiti artists, Alice taught herself and also learned from friends.
“I started sketching graffiti on paper around age 11 or 12. I would spend the whole afternoon just working on variations of letters and different possibilities for joining them together, and then I decided to try doing it on walls. I met some other girls from the area who were into graffiti; we decided to save up some money and, without telling our parents, we bought some sprays.”
For her tag name, she chose Femie — a girl’s name of Greek origin, derived from Euphemia and meaning “one who speaks well.” She would bike with her friends to paint graffiti on the outskirts of the city.
At the age of 19, Alice left Italy for London and started taking classes in formal calligraphy. She apprenticed under a professional calligrapher, Paul Antonio, who taught her skills that also apply to dance: balance, spatial relationships, posture, and rhythm.
“Vertical lines down, breathing out. Going up in a diagonal, breathing in. Sitting up straight, all the time. He would tell me, ‘Alice, sit up!’”
She developed the skills needed to become a professional calligrapher, but those traditions felt too restricting.
“For a while, I lived in a warehouse with a painter, a musician, and a photographer, and it opened my mind to different ways of collaborating. Music and writing both have rhythm, so I started organizing small events where my friends were playing and I was writing with the music.”
Then, she took her art form to the public, setting up rolls of paper and asking people to join in. “I really enjoyed seeing people writing in a way that is free, and not forced,” she says. “Most of the people would tell me, ‘Oh no, I have bad handwriting.’ There is this stigma around writing that it has to be perfect.”
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“My main point with these performances is that writing doesn’t have to be perfect or even legible,” she continues. “It makes no sense to teach writing for uniformity. If we want to be legible, we have computers and phones. The fact that everyone has different handwriting is such a beautiful thing that should be celebrated rather than penalized.”
Alice describes writing as a profound action. “You take an energy — a thought — and translate it into matter — the visible word,” she says. “It’s such an important way of understanding how a person thinks. It seems a shame to me that our society has forgotten what writing and handwriting are.”
It’s a message Alice now hopes to convey to her students in her jamigraphy workshops. She loves showing people how the physical act of writing creates moods and states within the body, which in turn are expressed in the shapes and forms of letters.
“It is a totally different experience than copying an alphabet,” she says.
It is the joy of the dance of writing.
Tim Brookes is the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project, which aims to create a list of the world’s writing systems, identifying every script currently in use and assessing its degree of health or vulnerability.
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