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

Painting the Town Blue and Green: Curating Street Art through Urban Mobile Gaming

Soolisuse esitamine Eesti grafitis ja tänavakunstis / Representing of gender in Estonian graffiti and street art

What is street art? Who is the street artist? Why is street art a crime? Since the late 1990s, a distinctive cultural practice has emerged in many cities: street art, involving the placement of uncommissioned artworks in public places. Sometimes regarded as a variant of graffiti, sometimes called a new art movement, its practitioners engage in illicit activities while at the same time the resulting artworks can command high prices at auction and have become collectable aesthetic commodities. Such paradoxical responses show that street art challenges conventional understandings of culture, law, crime and art. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination engages with those paradoxes in order to understand how street art reveals new modes of citizenship in the contemporary city. It examines the histories of street art and the motivations of street artists, and the experiences both of making street art and looking at street art in public space. It considers the ways in which street art has become an integral part of the identity of cities such as London, New York, Berlin, and Melbourne, at the same time as street art has become increasingly criminalised. It investigates the implications of street art for conceptions of property and authority, and suggests that street art and the urban imagination can point us towards a different kind of city: the public city. Street Art, Public City will be of interest to readers concerned with art, culture, law, cities and urban space, and also to readers in the fields of legal studies, cultural criminology, urban geography, cultural studies and art more generally.

Purpose. The purpose of this research was to analyze the thematic orientation, drivers, location and perception by residents of street art in Ukrainian cities. Accordingly, the research questions are as follows: where and which street art pieces are located in cities? what are the main triggers of their spread in urban space? how city residents percept street art? what dwellers think about impact of street art on socio-cultural space and should street art be regulated in cities? Research methods. The study is based on an analysis of media reports on street art, the results of in-depth semi-structured interviews with Kyiv residents, and the authors’ observations on the streets of several Ukrainian cities. Twelve semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with Kyiv residents in April-May 2021, which included blocks of questions on the perception of street art, its subject matter, location and the need to control and regulate their creation and distribution. The authors conducted observations on the streets during 2017-2021 in the cities of Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Odesa, Poltava, Kamyanets-Podilskyi, and Kramatorsk. Main findings. Based on the previous research, the main forms of street art and their place in urban space are analyzed. The analysis of street art pieces in Ukraine showed that in general there are tendencies of decentralization of their location in the urban space and regionalization. In other words, street art is spreading from the city center to the periphery, and along with the capital city and the main regional centers, street art pieces are becoming common elements of the urban space of other cities and towns. The vision of the residents testifies to their demand for the conformity of new street art pieces to the socio-cultural environment, the appropriateness of placement, and “embeddedness” into the urban space. It was revealed that key drivers of street art booming in Ukraine are urban art festivals, mega events, socio-political events and social troubles, developers` initiatives, as well as participatory budgeting programs. At the same time, the methods of implementation, thematic orientation and location of street art can cause conflicts and protests from individual residents, social movements, and municipalities as well. An analysis of the attitude to the thematic orientation of street art showed that the topics of nature, images of prominent people with an unblemished reputation, representatives of the most important professions, national, patriotic and social topics that encourage reflection, as well as texts of famous poems and quotations are most welcoming for Kyiv residents. The attitude to political issues accompanied by various appeals is distinctly negative. It has been confirmed that the local context of street art objects is considered as more important. It is shown that with the generally positive perception of street art, city dwellers are interested in the need to control and regulate the location of new murals and other street art pieces taking into account the public participation principles. In a relatively short period, street art have become a common practice of renewal, "beatification" and "Europeanization" of the urban space of many Ukrainian cities. Scientific novelty and practical value. The article develops the understanding of the place of street art in the urban space revealing the main peculiarities of the location, distribution and perception of street art in Ukrainian cities. The practical value of the study lies in the focus on identifying prospects for the implementation of the principles of participatory urban planning in the context of the creation of new street art pieces as a mean of improving public spaces.

Blu’s 2008 short film Muto is probably the most ambitious celebration of the intimate relationship connecting new-media technologies and street art.1 Critically acclaimed and viewed almost 12 million times on YouTube, this award-winning video is a stop-motion animation of hundreds of murals that the Italian street artist painted in different cities across the globe.2 Blu’s surreal figures invade the city and their gestures are experienced and appreciated through computer screens and mobile phone displays. When looking at street art’s relationship with new media, Muto is hardly an exception. Technology has played a crucial role in making the street art movement a popular genre. The availability of cheap digital cameras and the possibility of photo publishing on social media have transformed graffiti – the original and most radical form of street art – from an esoteric practice into a global phenomenon. Social networks have made available to internet users a constantly expanding gallery of street artworks. Communicating technologies have then radically changed how we engage with this art form. We primarily appreciated street artworks as and through photographs, in ways suggesting epistemic and ontological primacy of the “reproduction” over the “original.” For its constitutive linked with the city, street art’s digital media revolution had then affected how we perceive, experience, and conceptualize public places. In this paper, I argue that post-Internet street art has significantly re-shaped urban space, questioning dominant spatial hierarchies in politically subversive ways. Street art questions what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible” by making visible what usually remains unseen. It does so by deploying tactics thriving on the interplay between material and digital reality. Scholars have largely overlooked this link between the virtual and the real alleys of graffiti. Street art exists in between material and virtual reality, showing the conceptual and practical impossibility of their neat separation. Today’s public space is produced and negotiated also in binary code. Section 2 discusses the subversive nature of graffiti and street art. Section 3 examines writers’ and street artists’ use of communication technology and how this affects the practices and their link with the city. 1 “Blu, Muto, 2008.,” artforum.com, accessed May 1, 2017, https://www.artforum.com/video/mode=large&id=24319. 2 Vanessa Chang, “Animating the City: Street Art, Blu and the Poetics of Visual Encounter,” Animation 8, no. 3 (2013): 215–33, https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847713503280; Brad Yarhouse, “Animation in the Street: The Seductive Silence of Blu,” Animation Studies Online Journal 8 (2013), https://journal.animationstudies.org/brad-yarhouse-animation-in-the-street-the-seductive-silence-of-blu/; Pietro Rivasi, “Megunica,” Garage, 2007.

This research presents the theories pertaining to the real and imagined role of street art and mural art in current society, focusing on South Africa and Durban. This research also aims to improve my art practice by attempting to apply these theories. By investigating selected activist street and mural artists and movements, I have also aimed at learning from the work of those I admire. By extending my research beyond public two-dimensional art practice into the theories of African cities, cultural studies and white privilege, I have attempted to understand the socio-political factors involved in critical art making in the highly contested post-apartheid public space of Durban. I have discovered that my own belief in the value of street art and mural art in the public space, which this research aims to validate, does not appear to be encouraged or supported within the city of Durban, at large, which is reflected in a stunted street art and mural art culture. Within the context of post-apartheid Durban, a South African city in rapid transition environmentally, socially, economically and culturally, I would like to present street art and mural art as a pragmatic and effective means of cultural response. In this research a practice-based qualitative methodology was used. This is accompanied by theoretical research to contextualize and inform the art practice. The action research comprised of artwork produced in public spaces. Typically, this process involved identifying an ecological/social/political issue which is the artwork’s subject. The combination of practice- based and action research is the most suitable methodological approach for this study which essentially attempts to uncover knowledge pertaining to the function of mural art and street art in the world, more specifically in Durban. My findings show that the foremost function of street art and mural art appears to be the transformation of the public space into a more convivial living environment. The major strategies identified in the theoretical framework in attempting to initiate conviviality through street and mural art include site specificity and participation. Despite a history of attempting to democratize art in South Africa, post-apartheid contemporary society still suffers as a result of restricting the functionality of art by continuing to focus predominantly on the gallery and museum systems. I have found that mural and street art potentially align with the informal functioning of much of South Africa’s public space, encouraging an alternative to the western construction of public space. In conclusion, I argue that street art and mural art can be used as an effective transformative strategy to break down the invisible social barriers present in post-apartheid South African cities, by repurposing the physical barriers of walls.

The article considers the critical potential of both graffiti and street art using Berlin as an example, where these forms of urban creativity have flourished. It offers an interdisciplinary, context-related analysis by combining visual and spatial theories, which highlight both their critical agency as well as their affirmative potential in processes of gentrification. In this way, the study takes up the question of Avramidis and Tsilimpounidi about what graffiti and street art actually do in urban space. Thus, they are understood as spatial and visual forms of critique and protest, as also historic positions within the discourses on architecture and the city show, where graffiti, in particular, appears as a critical term. This applies to the general notion of graffiti being a confrontation with the capitalist system and its hegemonic spectacle, as well as the abject view, comparing them with dirt within a racist discourse. Finally, these contestations of and within the democratic city dissolve themselves in the post-urban paradigm. This implies a notion of the city under complete private ownership and control where there is no place for dialectics anymore and the ‘urban’ is seen as a threat to society.

The SAUC V5 Issue 2, “Desire Lines: Metaphorical” is about: The Disappearance/Virtualisation of Graffiti and Street Art – From Urban to Institutional to Virtual Space; Whose Wall is it Anyway? Using street art to navigate the private and the public in a community; Polysemiotic Communication vs. Multimodality: a conceptual and terminological distinction applied in street art; The Past in Public Space “Der Jahrhundertschritt”: A Lieu de Memoire As An Urban Intervention of Memory (2018); Zero Tolerance = 100 New Techniques Swedish / Nordic Street Art; Contextualizing graffiti and street art in suitable museum settings: Street Art Today’s upcoming museum in Amsterdam; There and Back Again: Redistributing Visibility between the Virtual and Real Alleys of Graffiti; From Post-Posters to Un gilet; Streetness & Inopinatum: the “sense of the street” and the “unexpected impertinence”. For a binary code in street art.; Street Art is dead. Again and again. Brief State of the (Urban) Art. With contributions from Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Spain, China, France and Italy.


 
 
 Street art is a type of visual art that is often created in urban environments, adorning the walls of buildings, streets, and other publicly viewed surfaces. Despite its unfair reputation as “vandalism,” street art is increasingly recognized as an expressive art form and a feature of urban visual culture. Challenging traditional conventions of art, street art is radical both in its production and display. In its production, street art is anti-authoritarian and reclaims public space; in display, street art engages with everyday onlookers dialectically. As street art has transformed the possibilities of artistic display and production, so too must libraries respond by providing the information literacy needed to study and understand street art within its sociopolitical contexts. Libraries can intervene by liaising between street artists and users to increase public awareness of street art and dismantle negative stereotypes, and by providing classroom instruction that connects information literacy with the sociopolitical aspects of street art. Finally, art libraries can communicate the risks in creating street art to protect potential practitioners.
 
 

This article presents the notion of spatial justice as a way of considering the relationship between law and street art in a manner beyond the legal/illegal dichotomy. Through a series of empirical examples, it is demonstrated how street art literally takes a place already taken and imposes itself in an already appropriated urban public space. Street art thus redefines the space in contestation to law. However, street art is ephemeral and its taking of space is not permanent. Street art points to an alternative spatial definition, one of spatial justice, before – and, indeed, while – withdrawing from the space it occupies. Street art creates a rupture in the lawscape which makes explicit the presence and claims of law, thereby also making the need for law’s other – justice – pronounced. The question of relationality between law and street art which we bring forth in the present article plays itself out as a production of space and spatial justice in an exchange of place-taking, withdrawal and pronounciation. Spatial justice, as we perceive it here, is thus a way of thinking about law and street art not simply as polar opposites, but rather as co-dependent and bound together in an ongoing process of oscillation, mutual reinforcement and creativity.

Mizzart, a collective of students from different artistic fields, created large-scale paintings in the urban landscape in Ljubljana in the 1980s and 1990s. Their independent artistic practices in public space in the 1980s and 1990s could be described as ‘proto-street art’ – a new avenue of contemporary research in graffiti and street art studies. Based on a brief historical introduction of genealogical connections between street art and graffiti, upgraded with Rafael Schacter's classification of 'street art' as a defined artistic period, the article identifies the main characteristics of ‘proto-street art’, which are: the time of occurrence, agents, spontaneity/sovereignty, iconography, site specificity, unprofitability and interaction with public. Mizzart’s ephemeral cultural heritage is analysed by the proposed seven key formal elements of ‘proto-street art’.

What is street art? This paper offers a definition of street art as an art kind or art form based on its essential value: its subversiveness. It argues that street art is essentially subversive in virtue of using public space as a technical resource. By hijacking a portion of the urban landscape with its colourful forms and witty designs, street art challenges familiar ways of practising the city, while creating a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ of free expression. There, corporate control over the city’s visible surfaces is ridiculed and people reclaim their right to use the city. In this sense, street art functions as a carnivalesque tactic of social resistance, favouring the emergence of alternative ways to imagine our urban life and our uses of public space. By considering its subversiveness, one can also explain how street art (i) significantly differs from official public art; (ii) includes graffiti as its original and most radical style.

<p>The long-imagined fiction of a digitally supplemented world is fast becoming a reality. Augmented Reality technology is advancing at a rapid rate, approaching mass adoption and use. Available to anyone with a modern mobile phone, Augmented Reality allows for a number of possibilities, augmenting the physical world with information or content of varying types. These possibilities have a number of implications for both utility and creative expression. This thesis explores the use of Augmented Reality as a tool for creative expression, comparing its use of the physical world to Street Art’s use of the street. Street Art uses the street as an artistic resource (Riggle, 2010) to provoke and elicit response. Augmented Reality uses physical location and context to strengthen its content and deliver information or entertainment. Augmented Reality Artworks have contested physical space (Skwarek, 2014; Veenhof & Skwarek, 2010) and shifted the boundaries of curation (Garbe, 2014). This thesis compares the histories of Augmented Reality and Street Art, resulting in a proposal for using Augmented Reality as a method for Street Art, allowing artists to create Digital Street Art. Research through Design explores this practice, creating Digital Street Art works that use the possibilities of Augmented Reality technology to use the street as an artistic resource. Using digital techniques like animation, interactivity, data visualisation and three-dimensional imagery; this thesis aims to explore how the Digital Street Artist can create work that engages with the public space and provoke a response. This is explored through several Digital Street Art responses to the public space and issues that can be addressed within it. These responses are designed to use digital techniques and AR technology to make artistic use of the street. Allowing it to be both Digital in nature and Street Art in essence.</p>

<p>The long-imagined fiction of a digitally supplemented world is fast becoming a reality. Augmented Reality technology is advancing at a rapid rate, approaching mass adoption and use. Available to anyone with a modern mobile phone, Augmented Reality allows for a number of possibilities, augmenting the physical world with information or content of varying types. These possibilities have a number of implications for both utility and creative expression. This thesis explores the use of Augmented Reality as a tool for creative expression, comparing its use of the physical world to Street Art’s use of the street. Street Art uses the street as an artistic resource (Riggle, 2010) to provoke and elicit response. Augmented Reality uses physical location and context to strengthen its content and deliver information or entertainment. Augmented Reality Artworks have contested physical space (Skwarek, 2014; Veenhof & Skwarek, 2010) and shifted the boundaries of curation (Garbe, 2014). This thesis compares the histories of Augmented Reality and Street Art, resulting in a proposal for using Augmented Reality as a method for Street Art, allowing artists to create Digital Street Art. Research through Design explores this practice, creating Digital Street Art works that use the possibilities of Augmented Reality technology to use the street as an artistic resource. Using digital techniques like animation, interactivity, data visualisation and three-dimensional imagery; this thesis aims to explore how the Digital Street Artist can create work that engages with the public space and provoke a response. This is explored through several Digital Street Art responses to the public space and issues that can be addressed within it. These responses are designed to use digital techniques and AR technology to make artistic use of the street. Allowing it to be both Digital in nature and Street Art in essence.</p>

This paper is written from the perspective of Street Art Murals Australia (‘SAMA’), a social enterprise which takes an asset-based and community development approach to street art. SAMA fosters a creative outlet for youth and encourages community involvement through the development of legal avenues of street art. SAMA also recognises the importance of a vibrant street art culture to a more inclusive society, urban renewal and beautification, and creative economies. The current legal and regulatory measures concerning street art, taken by local and state governments in Australia, could be replaced with an approach which recognises the benefits of a self-regulating street art culture and community public art intervention. Society has much to gain by placing street art in the public art domain rather than relying purely on punitive measures. Young street artists deserve to be able to express their artistic and creative freedom in public spaces.