#banksyinstockholm - The politics of street art and spatiality

• Autor(a) principal: Thor,Tindra
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://scielo.pt/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1646-59542015000400002
• topic: ‘Banksy'; graffiti and street art; artistic interventions; spatial creation; cosmopolitan space

In March 2014, Swedish news agencies received an anonymous handwritten letter stating that ‘Banksy' - currently 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. Using discourse analysis, this article explores #banksyinstockholm as an urban moment of artistic and spatial improvisation in relation to ideas on spatial subversion, paradoxical space, and aesthetic cosmopolitanism. The moment centers around three main subjectivities - the Hipster, the Doubters and ‘Banksy', which all become discursive creators/creations of the event through simultaneous presences on the Internet and on-site. The art space becomes a temporal strategy, which holds the potential of displacing and resisting the hegemonic makings of urban space. Furthermore, the exploration points to how a discursive construction of a mediated city event attaches and detaches subjects to and from specific places, performances and symbolisms and how notions of place, performance, dialogue and subjects are (re)negotiated in that process.