My tagger name is Curious Sleuth, and my unsolicited guerrilla street art is not vandalism but craftivism. In this story, statues tell a tale of yarn graffiti embodied with a subversive message.

The stage is set at an ostentatious suburban house in an upmarket Joburg suburb. Passers-by stare aghast at its boundary wall lined with numerous concrete statues resembling effigies of Zeus and Aphrodite. In South Africa, a country battling remnants of its apartheid legacy, the cost of this extravagant wall could have subsidised housing in an impoverished community nearby.

To protest this eyesore, the wall offered me an open-air theatre with a perfectly primed canvas. I crocheted garlands to soften the concrete’s starkness. Working super-fast, I adorned the statues, grabbed my ladder, and hopped into my friend’s get-away vehicle escaping security guards. Within 24 hours, the garlands had been thrown away and a fresh coat of pristine whiteness was slathered on. This adrenalin infused adventure provokes contemplative thought because our yarns are tellers of us.