The geosemiotics of ethno-political graffiti in Kosovo: polyphony, emplacement and heteroglossia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the nature of graffiti semiotics in the public space of Kosovo’s capital Pristina. By adopting a perspective on graffiti as a historically situated and semiotic practice, we identify distinct ethno-political voices, each relying on highly multimodal-linguistic resources to convey their respective political messages to a wider audience. The corpus was gathered during a specific period in Kosovo’s history (2013-2014) and as such allows us to capture the idiosyncratic nature of the encountered graffiti as a phenomenon which emerges as a non-transgressively emplaced and dynamically constructed medium allowing conflicting views on the political future of Kosovo to enter in dialogue with one another for everyone to see in the public heart of the capital. Moreover, the dynamic nature of graffiti inscriptions in the Kosovo capital makes it a conversationally layered, inherently heteroglossic speech act with several dissenting authors at work. Our fieldwork and analysis contribute not only to insights in the nature of graffiti as a political medium but also to our understanding of the phenomenology of ethno-political graffiti in Kosovo, the complexities of which can only be appreciated against the history of both the country as a contested geographical entity, and the Balkan region at large.