Ni État Ni Patron

Brussels. A quiet wall, a passing car, and a message that’s louder than both.

The slogan is old—older than the paint used to scrawl it—Ni État Ni Patron. No state, no boss. A phrase that echoes from factories, barricades, pamphlets. And now, here it is again, on a half-covered stretch of rendered concrete. It wasn’t written to decorate. It was written to remain.

The graffiti stands out not just for what it says, but for where it says it: in the middle of a freshly patched rectangle, painted over what was clearly another message before it. The wall becomes a palimpsest—layers of resistance, erasure, and return.

Below it, a car creeps past. The driver is caught in frame, face half-shadowed by the dashboard. He’s looking straight ahead, not up at the wall. Maybe he’s seen it a hundred times. Maybe he hasn’t. But the juxtaposition—graffiti on permanence, person in transit—is what makes the image whole.

This isn’t protest in motion. It’s protest in sediment. Graffiti not as art, but as archaeology. Still there, still read, still resisted.