In this article, based on two case studies conducted in Stockholm and London, we discuss how graffiti and street art provide forms of expressive cosmopolitanism in reclaiming voice and reciprocity in the city. Through in-depth interviews and observations, we explore how urban artists, using their practice, foster ever-transient and contesting senses of outsidered aesthetics and communicative culture that both seek to challenge the institutionalization and hegemonic indoctrination of today's media cities and, as such, become part of the ensemble that constitute its visual geography. While there are many parallels and inter-urban synchronicity, our results indicate that locally-specific elements are prominent in each city. Both studies indicate that the solidaritarian and spatially mediating character of graffiti and street art, and not just their contents, constitutes a resource in sustaining the possibility of coproducing worldly visions in and of the cities. They both observe struggles for openness and social critique taking place across time and space.
In March 2014 Swedish news agencies received an anonymous handwritten letter stating that “Banksy”, probably the world’s most famous street artist, would hold his first “official unofficial exhibit in Sweden”. The validity of this press release was heavily debated throughout the week in Swedish media. Would this mythical street artist whose real name no one knows make an appearance in Stockholm? Could it be a PR stunt and if it were, would it be worth seeing anyway? On Sunday 23 March 8000 people gathered to find out.
This article discursively explores the event as an urban moment of artistic and spatial improvisations in relation to ideas on spatial subversion, paradoxical space and aesthetic cosmopolitanism. The paradoxical space becomes as a temporal strategy, which holds the potential of displacing and resisting the hegemonic makings of urban space. Further the exploration of the event points to how a discursive construction of an event attaches and detaches signifiers to and from specific places, performances and symbolisms and how notions of place, performance and subjects are (re)negotiated in that process.
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