Walls That Speak, Streets That Forget: Visual Dissent and the Afterlife of #EndSARS

Abstract Street art during Nigeria’s #EndSARS protests constituted a set of ephemeral interventions that disrupted dominant narratives of state power and reshaped the politics of urban visibility. This article foregrounds critical perspectives from spatial theory and performativity to develop a framework for understanding how protest murals and graffiti operated as contingent practices of spatial production. This article discusses the urban conditions that enabled these inscriptions to emerge, their tactical reconfiguration of public space, and the ways in which their erasure and transience mirrored the unstable terrain of protest itself. This article argues that theorizing these visual acts through Lefebvre’s conception of socially produced space (1991), de Certeau’s tactics of the everyday (1984), and Butler’s performativity illuminates their capacity to unsettle sedimented orders of authority (2015) while choreographing fleeting relations of solidarity and dissent. Rather than memorializing resistance, these interventions generated momentary fissures within established regimes of meaning and belonging, opening temporary sites for renegotiating visibility, memory, and power. This theoretical framing contributes to debates on the aesthetics of resistance by repositioning protest street art as a practice of spatial dissensus embedded in the uneven temporality of urban struggle.